With our database unavailable due to investigations of a corrupt data entry, let’s have a throwback Thursday. Hence, let’s look back at the very first light curve of the week, which was published (facebook page only) on January 7th, 2019.
It shows the first 2.5years of our V, R, and I-band data of the extremely variable young star V2492Cyg in the Pelican Nebula. We now have an additional 4.5yr of data in the database. This source is a very interesting object which can change the brightness by more than six magnitudes. This is caused by variable circumstellar extinction as well as accretion rate changes. In recent years the source has undergone several deep dimming and rebrightening events. During some of the faint stages it completely disappeared below our detection limit for several months.
Here is what we wrote about the light curve, back when it all started:
“Lightcurve of the week #1: Happy New Year everyone. Since we now have quite a lot of data, we thought to try to post each week one of the lightcurves from the database to show the variety of objects we are investigating. Our first object is the variable V2492Cyg, which is one of the most unusual objects in all of our fields. The strong variations are most likely caused by changes in the line of sight extinction and changes in the mass accretion rate.”
We are happy to say that the idea of the light curve of the week is still continuing 174 weeks after the first one, without interruptions.