`Winking` star used to stare into space

Washington, Aug 10: A star that "winks" used to stare steadily into space just a few decades ago, bolstering the theory that embryonic planets are blocking the star’s light, researchers saida.

The winking star, known to astronomers as KH 15D, has a regular, 20-day-long eclipse every 48 days. Astronomers theorized last year that the long eclipses were caused by blobs of material in a cosmic disk that surrounds the young star.

Researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics found that the winking was not present a few decades ago, meaning that the eclipses are a recent phenomenon. The eclipses might be caused by an embryonic giant planet the size of Jupiter which could be embedded in this disk, the astronomers said.

This kind of object could cause a ripple or bump in the star’s surrounding disk. The ripple could evolve over 10 to 100 years, they said, and could obscure the star’s light for days at time.
Bureau Report