An image taken by the Dark Energy Camera in Chile shows TIC 400799224. The image is from Powell et al.
There are many mysteries in the universe.
Astronomers stumbled on a mystery and a dusty one while observing the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite. A team of scientists are looking into the causes of strange signals emitted by an object.
According to the statement from the Harvard-Smiths, the object may be a double star system, in which one of the stars is surrounded by a large cloud of dust, the rubble of a large asteroid.
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TESS is designed to spot exoplanets by looking for dips in the brightness of a star caused by a planet passing in between the telescope and the star. TESS has gathered a lot of observations on everything from exploding stars to triple star systems, because planets aren't the only phenomenon that can cause changing brightness.
TIC 400799224 stood out because it became nearly 25% dimmer in just a few hours, then made several more sudden brightness changes. The TIC stands for TESS Input Catalog and references a database of "every optically persistent, stationary object in the sky."
An artist's depiction of NASA's TESS in space. The image was taken at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The object was included in four different sectors between March and May of this year, because the patches overlap and TESS spends about one month on a single patch of the sky. The All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae and the Las Cumbres Observatory were used by the researchers for additional information on the strange object.
Scientists were able to piece together a picture of what might be causing the strange signal. The researchers think that TIC 400799224 is a star in which two stars circle each other. The astronomer says that one of the stars is causing the more complicated patterns because of a massive cloud of dust. They calculate that the dust has a mass equal to the remains of an asteroid.
The scientists think that the most likely explanation is that asteroids are creating the dust. The amount of dust seems to have stayed the same over the past six years, so it's a difficult case to explain. The researchers want to understand the strange patterns of the object.
The research is described in a journal.
Follow her on social media: EmailMeghan Bartels at mbartels@space.com Follow us on social media.
