In April 2012, a giant star was seen to drop in brightness by 97% across all colors, and it stayed dimmed for a few hundred days. This is not normal, and astronomers have kept watching this star for nine years, watching to see if it would once again go dark.

Not only has the star never dimmed again, but the star seems to have been utterly unchanged by this event. This indicates that, in all likelihood, something passed in front of the star. What that something was? No idea. Whatever it was, it was big. To block that much light, it would be so thick it could span a quarter of the way from the Sun to the Earth and be bigger than the star in diameter. How this kind of object finds itself both gravitationally held together and passing a star? Well, one of the best ideas the researchers came up with is a black hole surrounded by a cloud of dusty, messy debris. We will probably never know for sure what this was, but it’s cool to imagine there are black holes out there, surrounded by a disc of dark stuff, periodically just dimming stars.

More Information

University of Cambridge press release

“VVV-WIT-08: the giant star that blinked,” Leigh C Smith et al., 2021 June 11, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society