Remember the object Gaia24ala which we posted about in week 266? It got flagged up by Gaia due to a sudden drop in brightness on top of a longer term dimming event, making it about 2mag fainter at about JD=2460335 – late January, 2024.
In the above plot we show the V, and I-band data of the source for the past year and a half-ish. The above mentioned dimming event is seen in the left part of the data, during the previous visibility season. One can see that the source did ‘recover’ to within just below 1mag of its pre-dimming brightness towards the end of the visibility.
After the gap in the data caused by the Sun being in the way, we find that the object remains mostly at a constant magnitude – so far. However, its brightness is now at or even below the level it had during the dimming event. It has now gotten so faint that we have ‘lost’ it in the B-band data – we do have brightness measurements in that filter for last season, but the source has remained undetected thus far in the B-filter.
Lets see what happens next 😉