Investigating the Star That Almost Vanished for Eight Months

Stars change in brightness for all kinds of reasons, but all of them are interesting to astronomers at some level. So imagine their excitement when a star known as J0705+0612 (or, perhaps more politically incorrectly, ASASSN-24fw) dropped to around 2.5% of its original brightness for 8.5 months. Two new papers – one from Nadia Zakamska and her team at the Gemini Telescope South and one from Raquel Forés-Toribio at Ohio State and her co-authors – examine this star and have come to the same conclusion – it’s likely being caused by a circumsecondary disk.