“We have speculated that the most likely explanation is that we observed a disk of gas-dust around another star,” Sergey Koposov from the University of Edinburgh told The Daily Galaxy about the detection of a giant blinking star –VVV-WIT-08– 100 times the size of the sun at the center of our Milky Way Galaxy that dims by 97% then slowly returns to former brightness. “That star itself is invisible, hidden by the disk. We think that the ‘star’ with that gas-dust disk is itself orbiting around the giant star with a period of tens of years.”
Avi Shporer, Research Scientist, MIT Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research. A Google Scholar, Avi was formerly a NASA Sagan Fellow at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). His motto, not surprisingly, is a quote from Carl Sagan: “Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”