admin Astronomers observed Gaia17bpp, a distant star, fainting more than 4,500 times between 2012 and 2019. However, in 2019, the star mysteriously brightened. A distant world named Gaia17bpp has reappeared before the eyes of Earth after seven years of solar eclipses, revealing an extremely rare binary star system in the universe.
To solve this mystery, the team led by astronomer Anastasios Tzanidakis from the University of Washington (USA) combined observations from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia satellite with observations from other missions from the US, and discovered the existence of a “dead world” near the mysterious star.
It is a companion white dwarf star surrounded by a disk of matter in the form of dust, giants and spreading. It inadvertently flew across the region of space between Earth and the star Gaia17bpp, giving a rarely observed “eclipse” view from the globe.
White dwarfs, which are “zombies” of stars such as the Sun, collapsed after they ran out of energy.
For further determination, the team used DASCH, a digital catalog with 100 years of astronomical observations hosted by Harvard University (USA), and identified Gaia17bpp as having never faded again.
Measurements showed that the binary star system was located at extremely distant distances and took up to 1,000 years to orbit each other, so that the observation of the seven-year “eclipse” was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
The properties displayed by this pair also show that this is an extremely rare binary system in the universe. The study had just been published in the 241st session of the American Astronomical Society.
