• This forum is specifically for the discussion of factual science and technology. When the topic moves to speculation, then it needs to also move to the parent forum, Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF/F).

    If the topic of a discussion becomes political, even remotely so, then it immediately does no longer belong here. Failure to comply with these simple and reasonable guidelines will result in one of the following.
    1. the thread will be moved to the appropriate forum
    2. the thread will be closed to further posts.
    3. the thread will remain, but the posts that deviate from the topic will be relocated or deleted.
    Thank you for understanding.​

Astronomy: Astronomers spot another star that flickers like Tabby’s star

Introversion

Pie aren't squared, pie are round!
Kind Benefactor
Super Member
Registered
Joined
Apr 17, 2013
Messages
10,652
Reaction score
14,890
Location
Massachusetts
It’s unclear what’s causing the newly discovered object to blink, but it’s probably not aliens

Science News said:
There’s another oddly flickering star in the galaxy.

Astronomers using a telescope in Chile have discovered a star whose strange dimming and brightening of light are reminiscent of Tabby’s star, which was once suggested to host an alien megastructure.

The megastructure idea, first posited in 2015, was later quashed by data suggesting that the dips are probably from dust particles obscuring the star’s light (SN Online: 1/3/18). The new star’s behavior is probably not due to aliens, either. But it is baffling, says astronomer Roberto Saito of the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis, Brazil. He and his colleagues reported the star’s flickering November 6 on arXiv.org.

“We don’t know what the object is,” he says. “And that’s interesting.” The star could have some sort of orbiting debris that periodically blocks the starlight, but Saito and colleagues say they need more observations to figure out if that’s possible or if the flicker is caused by something else.

The researchers had been searching for supernovas, stars that suddenly brighten as they explode, when the team spotted the object in data taken with the VISTA telescope in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile. The data were part of a larger survey of the galaxy’s center called the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea, or VVV.

Instead of brightening, this star suddenly dimmed. The team called it VVV-WIT-07, for “What is this?”

From 2010 to 2018, the star’s brightness waxed and waned with no set pattern. That lack of pattern is similar to Tabby’s star, except VVV-WIT-07’s light dropped by up to 80 percent, while Tabby’s star dimmed by only about 20 percent.

There’s another flickering star, J1407, that might be a closer match. That star periodically dims by up to 95 percent, astronomer Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues reported in 2012. Astronomers think J1407 hosts an orbiting planet with an enormous ring system that periodically eclipses the star (SN: 3/7/15, p. 5).

...

95%! I wonder what spectrums they're observing this? Visible light, presumably? If dust clouds were responsible, would such a star dim as much in infrared?