Astronomers Discover the Surprising Reason for a Star's Disappearance
Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:
Astronomers discover the surprising reason for a star's disappearance
The steady beam of a star twice the size of the sun played a trick on astronomers about a year ago: It vanished.
Then some nine months later, it reappeared in the constellation Monoceros, about 3,200 light-years away in space.
Now researchers think they've solved the mystery of one of the longest star-dimming events ever recorded. The star, called ASASSN-24fw, may have disappeared behind a giant planet with an enormous system of rings, according to new research, blocking most of its light from reaching Earth for nine months.
The steady beam of a star twice the size of the sun played a trick on astronomers about a year ago: It vanished.
Then some nine months later, it reappeared in the constellation Monoceros, about 3,200 light-years away in space.
Now researchers think they've solved the mystery of one of the longest star-dimming events ever recorded. The star, called ASASSN-24fw, may have disappeared behind a giant planet with an enormous system of rings, according to new research, blocking most of its light from reaching Earth for nine months.
[...] The team's top explanation involves a brown dwarf surrounded by humongous rings, similar in shape to Saturn's but vastly larger, eclipsing the star. In this case, the rings are estimated to stretch about 15.8 million miles from the brown dwarf, about half the distance between the sun and Mercury.
As the ring system moved in front of the star, it blocked about 97 percent of ASASSN-24fw's light. By studying changes in the star's brightness and light patterns - methods astronomers use to infer mass and motion - the team estimates the hidden object weighs more than three times as much as Jupiter.
The data also suggest the star itself has leftover material close by, possibly debris from past or ongoing planetary collisions. That is unusual for a star believed to be more than a billion years old.
Journal Reference: Sarang Shah, Jonathan P Marshall, Carlos del Burgo, et al., The nature of ASASSN-24fw's occultation: modelling the event as dimming by optically thick rings around a substellar companion, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 546, Issue 3, March 2026, staf2251, https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/staf2251
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