The sky around the TIC object TIC 400799224 has an optical/near-infrared image of it. Astronomers have concluded that the periodic variations in the light from this object are caused by a cloud of dust that moves around the star. Powell et al., 2021.
The goal of the TESS is to discover small planets around the sun's nearest neighbor stars. TESS has found 172 confirmed exoplanets and compiled a list of 888-492-0 888-492-0s. TESS has assembled a TESS Input Catalog with over 1 billion objects, and it has a sensitive camera that takes images that span a huge field of view. TIC objects have been found to result from stellar pulsations, shocks from supernovae, disintegrating planets, and more.
Karen Collins is an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The method they used to search the catalog was based on the observed behaviors of hundreds of thousands of known variable objects. The unusual source TIC 400799224 was spotted by chance because of its rapid drop in brightness, followed by several sharp brightness variations that could each be interpreted as an eclipse.
Some of the facilities that the astronomer studied have been mapping the sky for longer than TESS has been operating. They found that the object is a pair of stars, and that one of them pulsates with a 19.77 day period, probably from a body that periodically emits clouds of dust. The periodicity is strict, but the dust occultations of the star are erratic and only visible from the ground. The amount of dust emitted by the body is large, and if an object like the asteroid Ceres were to break up, it would only last about eight thousand years. Over the last six years, the periodicity has remained strict, and the object emitting the dust seems to have remained intact.
The team plans to use historical observations of the sky to try and determine the variations over time.
Brian P. Powell and his co-authors wrote about Mysterious Dust-emitting Object Orbiting in The Astronomical Journal. There is a book titled "10847/1538-3881/ac2c 81".
The journal has information about astronomy.
Astronomers found a dusty object around a star on January 3, 2022.
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