A giant ‘blinking’ star has been spotted more than 25,000 light-years away from the centre of the Milky Way.
The star, VVV-WIT-08, has been observed by an international team of astronomers decreasing in brightness by a factor of 30 so that it nearly disappeared from the sky.
While many stars change in brightness because they pulsate or are eclipsed by another star in a binary system, it’s exceptionally rare for a star to become fainter over a period of several months and then brighten again.
“VVV-WIT-08 may belong to a new class of ‘blinking giant’ binary star system, where a giant star — 100 times larger than the Sun — is eclipsed once every few decades by an as-yet-unseen orbital companion,” researcher Dr. Sergey Koposov from the University of Edinburgh said.
“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,” he said.
“There are certainly more to be found, but the challenge now is in figuring out what the hidden companions are, and how they came to be surrounded by discs, despite orbiting so far from the giant star. In doing so, we might learn something new about how these kinds of systems evolve,” said Dr. Leigh Smith from Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy.
Since the star is located in a dense region of the Milky Way, the researchers considered whether some unknown dark object could have simply drifted in front of the giant star by chance.
However, simulations showed that there would have to be an implausibly large number of dark bodies floating around the Galaxy for this scenario to be likely.
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