Something Blotted Out a Star

[Roger]

About 1300 lightyears from Earth (some say 25,000 lightyears), coreward, floats a star that for a short while stirred the imagination and curiosity of just anybody who watches the sky. First, it brightened then it dimmed, it dimmed by as much 97%! The star is VVV-WIT-08, but to make it easier to refer to it, let's call it Vewitate. So yeah, Vewitate somehow was obscured for 200 days! And whatever obscured it had a well defined sharp edge. The best guess says it wasn't a dust cloud. For one thing, the dust cloud would have to be way way big, as Vewitate is 100 times larger than our sun, Sol. Sol has a diameter of about 864,938 miles. So if we multiply that by 100... Vewitate is approx. 86,500,000 miles in diameter. The dust disk that occulted the star would have been much larger, say about 200 million miles in diameter, Yet, well, whatever occulted it certainly didn't have any of the normal characteristics of dust.

For more info, click on MSN News: Mystery object blotted out a giant star for 200 days

For those so inclined below is little more data (Thanks to Wikipedia).

VVV-WIT-08
Observation data
Epoch J2000 Equinox J2000
Constellation: Scorpius
Right ascension: 17h 26m 29.387s
Declination: −35° 40′ 56.20″
Characteristics
Astrometry
Proper motion (μ): RA: 2.469[1] mas/yr
Dec.: 1.374[1] mas/yr
Parallax (π): 2.5190 ± 1.1187[2] mas
Distance approx.: 1,300 ly (approx. 400 pc)
Details
Other designations: Gaia DR2 5974962995291907584