A distant world called Gaia17bpp has reappeared before Earth’s eyes seven years after a solar eclipse, revealing an extremely rare binary star system in the universe.
According to Space, astronomers have observed Gaia17bpp, a distant star, dimming more than 4,500 times since 2012, only to suddenly brighten up again in 2019 in a ghostly fashion.
To find the answer to this mystery, the team led by astronomer Anastasios Tzanidakis from the University of Washington (USA) combined observations from the European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia satellite with other observations. observers from other missions from the United States, and discovered the existence of a “dead world” near the mysterious star.
It is a white dwarf companion surrounded by a massive, spreading disk of dusty matter. It accidentally flew across the space between Earth and the star Gaia17bpp, creating a “eclipse” scene rarely seen from the Earth’s side.
White dwarfs, which are “zombies” of stars like the Sun, collapse after running out of energy.
To be more specific, the team used DASCH, a digital catalog of 100 years of astronomical observations stored by Harvard University (USA), and determined that Gaia17bpp has never been similarly dimmed.
Measurements show that this binary star system is located at an extremely distant distance from each other and takes up to 1,000 years to orbit each other, so observing a 7-year “eclipse” is a golden opportunity for astronomers, which the authors describe as a “once-in-a-lifetime” event.
The properties displayed by this pair also suggest that this is an extremely rare binary star system in the universe.
The study was just published at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
