A mysterious object orbiting a star

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, using the TESS space telescope, detected a mysterious and dusty object orbiting a star, and it was named TIC 400799224.

Professor Karen Collins from the center said: ‘We spotted the mysterious object by chance, due to a rapid decrease in its brightness, by 25% for four hours, followed by many sharp differences in brightness, each of which can be interpreted as an eclipse.

Astronomers studied “TIC 400799224”, and found that this body may be a binary star system, from an object that periodically emits clouds of dust that obscure the star.

The scientists explained that the star’s dust is irregular in its shapes, depths and duration, and cannot be detected (at least from Earth), and that the nature of the object is puzzling, because the amount of dust emitted is large.

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