Overview
- From September 2024 to May 2025, the Sun-like star J0705+0612 about 3,000 light-years away dimmed by a factor of roughly 40.
- Observations show the star was occulted by a vast, slow-moving cloud of gas and dust about 200 million kilometers wide at a distance of roughly 2 billion kilometers.
- The cloud is gravitationally bound to an unseen secondary object with at least a few Jupiter masses, with possibilities including a giant planet, a brown dwarf, or a very low-mass star.
- High-resolution GHOST spectroscopy detected metals including iron and calcium and measured 3D gas velocities, revealing metallic winds moving separately from the host star.
- Given the system’s age of more than two billion years and its infrared excess, the team favors a collision-origin scenario for the disk, and archival data hint at recurring events roughly every 44 years.