Strange 'bing' star near heart of Milky Way catches scientists' eyes

[Admin]

It's always a good sign when astronomers are blunt about the degree to which some observations have puzzled them.

Strange 'bing' star near heart of Milky Way catches scientists' eyes : Read more

 

[rod]

The article states, "The team of astronomers focused on observations of an object dubbed VVV-WIT-08 for the survey that discovered it. The strange sight is more than 25,000 light-years away from Earth in the direction of the center of the Milky Way, and the researchers were able to see them with not just the VVV project, but also the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE). Having dug into the measurements, scientists now suspect that the object is one massive star, 100 times larger than the sun, that is periodically blocked by a smaller companion object surrounded by an opaque disk."

The reference paper link, https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article-abstract/505/2/1992/6294924, says "We consider a number of possible candidates for the occulter, which must be optically thick and possess a radius or thickness in excess of 0.25 au. None are completely satisfactory matches to all the data."

So we have a 100 times larger star than the sun some 25,000 LY away with a possible occulter that is some 0.5 au in diameter. Using a 1 solar mass star with 50 solar radii, the diameter ~ 0.465 au. Resolving objects like this at some 7700 pc distance would be very challenging

 

[Helio]

Here is the pdf version of the paper. The light dip was in 2012 and it lasted for "a few hundred days".