This eclipse goes on and on
Nearby star is hidden by its companion for 3.5 years
LIGHT BLOCKER A dust-enshrouded star orbiting another star drives the longest known eclipse and probably looks similar to the previous record holder, illustrated here.
Brian Thieme, Aaron Price (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Once every 69 years, a nearby star dramatically dims for about three and a half years during the longest known stellar eclipse in our galaxy.
The star, called TYC 2505-672-1, is a red giant, about 10,000 light-years away in the constellation Leo Minor. The star is orbited by a dim, hot companion star that appears to be enveloped by a thick cloud of dust roughly one to three times as wide as Earth’s orbit. The cloud, reported in an upcoming Astronomical Journal, blocks much of the red star’s light from reaching Earth for a good long time.
Researchers already knew that TYC 2505-672-1 had drastically faded recently. But astronomer Joseph Rodriguez of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and colleagues scoured data from many telescopes — including a Harvard University photograph archive dating back to 1890 — and found that the starlight
