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Giant blinking star spotted near center of Milky Way galaxy - CNN

Giant blinking star spotted near center of Milky Way galaxy - CNN

Giant blinking star spotted near center of Milky Way galaxy - CNN
Jun 11, 2021 1 min, 5 secs

The study published Friday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The center of our galaxy is a dense region that includes a supermassive black hole, superclusters of stars, streams of gas and magnetic filaments.

"It's amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star, and we can only speculate what its origin is," said Sergey Koposov, study coauthor and reader in observational astronomy at the University of Edinburgh, in a statement.

At first, the researchers speculated that an unknown dark object passed in front of the giant star, but that would only be possible if there were a large number of these objects in the galaxy, which is unlikely.

A study of other such unique star systems including giant stars that dim and brighten, or showcase this blinking pattern, helped the researchers determine that a new class of blinking giant stars may exist and need to be investigated.

So far, it appears there are around six such systems.

The star system in this study was found using the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea, or VVV survey.

This project, utilizing the VISTA telescope at the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has observed 1 billion stars for almost a decade to see how they vary in brightness.

Summarized by 365NEWSX ROBOTS

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