Mystery object blotted out a giant star for 200 days

[FfFfFfFF 58,135]

Stars may twinkle, but they don’t just vanish—so when a distant, giant star pulled a disappearing act for about 200 days, it took astronomers by surprise.

This star that winked out for the first half of 2012 intriguing. During the first half of 2012, the star almost completely disappeared, losing 97 percent of its brightness.

Perplexed by the star’s unusual characteristics, Smith and his colleagues began trying to explain the phenomenon. They considered changes in brightness that originate from pulsations or spasms within the star itself—behavior that is quite common, but which doesn’t occur to a dramatic degree in stars like VVV-WIT-08. The scientists also ruled out the idea that the eclipse could be explained by a chance alignment with a dark foreground object closer to Earth that just happened to get in the way, such as a dusty, dim star.

“We’d need a huge number of these dark floating objects,” Smith says. “That’s a pretty unlikely scenario—we should have seen many more of this kind of thing nearby.”

Wright and others think it’s more likely that whatever occluded VVV-WIT-08 is gravitationally bound to the star. And if that’s true, the authors say, perhaps the best explanation involves a huge, dusty debris disk swirling around an orbiting companion star. Systems like this already exist, notably Epsilon Aurigae, where a supergiant star is partially eclipsed by a giant, dust-enshrouded companion every 27 years.

Another potential explanation is an orbiting black hole surrounded by a dark, dense debris ring—something that astronomers think should exist, but have never observed before.

Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/mystery-object-blotted-out-a-giant-star-for-200-days

[ActualPatient 2,512]

 Orrr maaybe even Dyson spheres by an alien civilization that then collapsed *tips tinfoil hat

[Guest]

Fascinating!

[MOT 3,608]

Oh. This is actually true. I initially assumed it was some sort of Gaga allegory.