Artists concept of a dark and mysterious item.
Its delicate cam takes images that span a big field of view, more than twice the area of the constellation of Orion, and TESS has also put together a TESS Input Catalog (TIC) with over 1 billion items. Follow-up studies of TIC objects have found they result from excellent pulsations, shocks from supernovae, disintegrating planets, gravitational self-lensed binary stars, eclipsing triple star systems, disk occultations, and more.
CfA astronomer Karen Collins belonged to a large team that found the strange variable object TIC 400799224. They browsed the Catalog using machine-learning-based computational tools established from the observed behaviors of hundreds of thousands of recognized variable things; the method has formerly found breaking down planets and bodies that are discharging dust. The unusual source TIC 400799224 was spotted serendipitously due to the fact that of its fast drop in brightness, by almost 25% in just a couple of 4 hours, followed by several sharp brightness variations that could each be translated as an eclipse.
An optical/near-infrared picture of the sky around the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) item TIC 400799224 (the crosshair marks the location of the item, and the width of the field of view is given in arcminutes). Astronomers have actually concluded that the mystical regular variations in the light from this things are triggered by an orbiting body that periodically gives off clouds of dust that occult the star. Credit: Powell et al., 2021
The astronomers studied TIC 400799224 with a variety of facilities consisting of some that have actually been mapping the sky for longer than TESS has been operating. They discovered that the object is probably a binary star system, and that one of the stars pulsates with a 19.77 day period, most likely from an orbiting body that occasionally emits clouds of dust that occult the star. While the periodicity is stringent, the dust occultations of the star are erratic in their depths, periods, and shapes, and are noticeable (at least from the ground) just about one-third of the time or less.
The nature of the orbiting body itself is perplexing due to the fact that the amount of dust given off is big; if it were produced by the disintegration of an item like the asteroid Ceres in our solar system, it would make it through only about eight thousand years before vanishing. Extremely, over the 6 years that this things has been observed, the periodicity has actually stayed stringent and the things discharging the dust obviously has actually stayed undamaged.
The team plans to continue monitoring the things and to include historical observations of the sky to attempt to determine its variations over many decades.
Recommendation: “Mysterious Dust-emitting Object Orbiting TIC 400799224” by Brian P. Powell, Veselin B. Kostov, Saul A. Rappaport, Andrei Tokovinin, Avi Shporer, Karen A. Collins, Hank Corbett, Tamás Borkovits, Bruce L. Gary, Eugene Chiang, Joseph E. Rodriguez, Nicholas M. Law, Thomas Barclay, Robert Gagliano, Andrew Vanderburg, Greg Olmschenk, Ethan Kruse, Joshua E. Schlieder, Alan Vasquez Soto, Erin Goeke, Thomas L. Jacobs, Martti H. Kristiansen, Daryll M. LaCourse, Mark Omohundro, Hans M. Schwengeler, Ivan A. Terentev and Allan R. Schmitt, 8 December 2021, The Astronomical Journal.DOI: 10.3847/ 1538-3881/ ac2c81.
Follow-up research studies of TIC objects have found they result from outstanding pulsations, shocks from supernovae, disintegrating worlds, gravitational self-lensed binary stars, eclipsing triple star systems, disk occultations, and more.
An optical/near-infrared image of the sky around the TESS Input Catalog (TIC) object TIC 400799224 (the crosshair marks the area of the things, and the width of the field of view is offered in arcminutes). They discovered that the things is probably a binary star system, and that one of the stars pulsates with a 19.77 day duration, most likely from an orbiting body that periodically releases clouds of dust that occult the star.