The database recovery has now almost finished and we started to run tests to check if all went as intended. Some further tests and changes are needed on the web interface, in order for it to work with the revised table structure. These will be done early next week and we hope to be back online by Wednesday at the latest. We will keep you posted.
As part of the test, I have extracted the light curve of V608Mon, a star at whose behaviour we looked at two weeks ago in one of our throwback light curves. In the long-term, seven years, light curve we can see that the dimming event of the object lasted about four years. These longer term events are either caused by changes in the mass accretion rate or occultation events of the star by disk structure in the outskirts of the disk. Due to their slow orbital motion, these events can last many years.
The light curve in the last year of data (observing season 2021/22) looks much more noisy than in the other years. Thus, we have zoomed into this part in the second plot. As one can see, the ‘noise’ is caused by shorter timescale variability. There is a half magnitude increase and decrease visible that occurs over a period of about two months. After that, the source remains roughly constant before again slowly increasing its average brightness.
The remaining noise in the data is not due to the measurement uncertainties. These are real variations in the brightness that occur on short timescales (less than a few days). This source is hence a good example how our data can be used to investigate the variability of young stars on a wide range of timescales, ranging from days to several years, i.e. more than three orders of magnitude.