{"id":220751,"date":"2025-08-23T00:06:50","date_gmt":"2025-08-23T05:06:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/dusty-structure-explains-near-vanishing-of-faraway-star"},"modified":"2025-08-23T00:06:50","modified_gmt":"2025-08-23T05:06:50","slug":"dusty-structure-explains-near-vanishing-of-faraway-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/dusty-structure-explains-near-vanishing-of-faraway-star","title":{"rendered":"Dusty structure explains near vanishing of faraway star"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/dusty-structure-explains-near-vanishing-of-faraway-star2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Stars die and vanish from sight all the time, but astronomers were puzzled when one that had been stable for more than a decade almost disappeared for eight months.<\/p>\n<p>Between late 2024 and early 2025, one star in our galaxy, dubbed ASASSN-24fw, dimmed in brightness by about 97%, before brightening again. Since then, scientists have been swapping theories about what was behind this rare, exciting event.<\/p>\n<p>Now, an international team led by scientists at The Ohio State University may have come up with an answer to the mystery. In a new study recently published in <a href=\"https:\/\/astro.theoj.org\/article\/143105-asassn-24fw-an-8-month-long-4-1-mag-optically-achromatic-and-polarized-dimming-event\" target=\"_blank\"><i>The Open Journal of Astrophysics<\/i><\/a>, astronomers suggest that because the color of the star\u2019s light remained unchanged during its dimming, the event wasn\u2019t caused by the star evolving in some way, but by a large cloud of dust and gas around the star that occluded Earth\u2019s view of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Stars die and vanish from sight all the time, but astronomers were puzzled when one that had been stable for more than a decade almost disappeared for eight months. Between late 2024 and early 2025, one star in our galaxy, dubbed ASASSN-24fw, dimmed in brightness by about 97%, before brightening again. Since then, scientists have [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[219,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}