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Strange 'blinking' star near heart of Milky Way catches scientists' eyes - Space.com
Jun 15, 2021 1 min, 8 secs

One such confusing object, discovered by a project called the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey, or VVV, appears to be just the second of its kind known to scientists — and a kind that appears to be particularly dramatic, according to new research.

"Occasionally we find variable stars that don't fit into any established category, which we call 'what-is-this?', or 'WIT' objects," co-author Philip Lucas, an astronomer at the University of Hertfordshire in the U.K., said in a statement.

The team of astronomers focused on observations of an object dubbed VVV-WIT-08 for the survey that discovered it.

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.

What precisely that smaller object is, scientists don't know yet.

"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," co-author Sergey Koposov, an astronomer at the University of Edinburgh in the U.K., said in a statement.

The VVV-WIT-08 observations mark the second time that scientists have seen this particular pattern; the brightness of a massive star known as Epsilon Aurigae halves every 27 years when a dust cloud passes between observers and the star.

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