This week we are looking at the light curve with probably the least amount of data points we ever had in this feature – now almost at it’s 4th anniversary. It is the light curve of the young star 2MASS J22562111+6244048.
The object is situated in the HOYS field, FSR408, which we only added as a new target field to our project last week. Instead of some interesting variability, it is more about the number of data points we have gathered in the last week. A count on the server shows that we have a total of 20 images (3xB, 6xV, 7xR, 1xHa, 3xI) of this field now. The source is not present in all the images and we have not shown the B-band data points.
The interesting thing about the object is that it is classified as a young star and it is projected right onto the cluster. However, the parallax from Gaia places the star at a distance of about 3kpc, while the cluster is at about 860pc. Thus, this nicely shows the importance of Gaia to identify cluster members using the parallaxes. By coincidence the star has almost the same proper motion on the sky as the cluster stars, and thus this might have caused its classification as a cluster member. Of course it might still be a young star in the background and we will see over time how variable to object really is.