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There is something strange near the galactic center.
About 25,000 light-years from Earth, astronomers have found a strange star that nearly disappeared for several months before reappearing.
Astronomers believe the star, called VVV-WIT-08, could belong to a new class of stars — giant monsters 100 times more than the sun obscured by a UFO orbiting once every few decades.
Stars with strange opaque signatures are endless magic. Although space is mostly relatively empty, it stands to reason that with all the stuff out there, some of it would line up in such a way that the stars would dimmer from our Earthly perspective from time to time.
It is not always easy to know what these things are. Giant planet? space dust? Debris from a broken body? Cony dragon?
The status of the VVV-WIT-08 is a case of mystery. Although other stars showed similar dips in light, none of them were this deep. Astronomers believe that the culprit could be another star or planet, surrounded by a thick, opaque disk of dust in a long orbit around VVV-WIT-08, which completely covers the star as it passes in front of our view.
“It is amazing that we have just observed a dark, large and elongated object passing between us and the distant star and we can only speculate what its source is,” said astronomer Sergei Koposov of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
The model of an orbiting companion with a giant disk is not without precedent. One famous and well-known example is Epsilon Origai, a giant star with a disk-encased companion in a 27-year orbit that dims the star by about 50 percent for up to 730 days.
Then there’s TYC 2505-672-1, a red giant star with a dust companion in a 69-year orbit that obscures the star for 3.5 years.
The survey that captured VVV-WIT-08 (“WIT” stands for “What’s This?” Because astronomers are that cool), VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey chose two other candidates that appear to exhibit the same behavior. Since the data on those stars is not as complete as that of VVV-WIT-08, it has not yet been described.
We know that star privacy is not a mistake. The dimming was also observed by experimenting with a gravitational-optical lens using the Warsaw Telescope in Chile, which means there was no glitch (although it must have been a very strange kind of glitch).
The data shows that the dimming event lasted for about 200 days, with a roughly symmetric light curve, dampening the star’s light by up to 97 percent. The density of objects required in that region of space to align two random objects by chance is much higher than what was observed, so the team believes the two objects are gravitationally bound.
The orbital period is unknown, but it should be at least a few decades, according to mathematical modeling.
The discovery suggests that such systems may not be rare.
“There is certainly more to be found, but the challenge now is to figure out what the hidden companions are, and how they became surrounded by disks, despite orbiting away from the giant star,” said astronomer Lee Smith of the university. Cambridge.
“By doing this, we may learn something new about how these types of systems evolve.”
The research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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