"Blinking Giant" Star Spotted by Astronomers Near the Center of the Milky Way Galaxy

Astronomers have discovered a massive 'blinking' star at the Milky Way's center, which is more than 25,000 light-years distant.

VVV-WIT-08 Star

VVV-WIT-08 was discovered by the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey (VVV), a project that has been observing the same one billion stars for nearly a decade to look for examples with varying brightness in the infrared part of the spectrum using the British-built VISTA telescope in Chile and operated by the European Southern Observatory.

Professor Philip Lucas of the University of Hertfordshire, one of the project's co-leaders, said, "We occasionally come across variable stars that defy categorization and are labeled as 'what-is-this?' or 'WIT' objects. We have no idea how these flashing behemoths came to be. After so many years of planning and accumulating data, it's thrilling to witness such breakthroughs from VVV."

While VVV-WIT-08 was identified using VVV data, the star's dimming was also noticed by the University of Warsaw's Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), a long-running observation effort. OGLE makes more observations, but they are closer to the visible spectrum. These frequent observations were crucial for modeling VVV-WIT-08, as they revealed that the huge star diminished in both visible and infrared radiation by the same amount.

Star Systems

There seems to be roughly a half-dozen known possible star systems of this sort, all of which feature huge stars and enormous, opaque discs. "There are undoubtedly more to be discovered," Smith said. "The question now is determining what the secret partners are and how they got to be ringed by discs despite circling so distant from the huge star." "We could learn something new about how these sorts of systems grow as a result of this."

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