Recently (Nov 23rd, 2024) Gaia flagged up the star MO Mon as an alert object Gaia24djm. It is situated at the edge of a small dark cloud next to the Cone Nebula. It got flagged up due to a ~1mag deep dimming event. Though the Gaia data show that similar kind of events seem to have happened in the past.
In the above plot we show the V and I-band data we have for the object. We can see that the dimming event is about 3 days long and 1.5mag deep. Unfortunately it coincided with slightly bad weather at the main observing site, thus the error bars are slightly increased. Though part of this is due to the lower flux.
We can see that even in the bit of the data we have shown, the source occasionally dims on short timescales (though not as extreme as this one). However, with the cadence of about 1 month the Gaia data will not be able to catch these events in enough detail to determine their duration. This is one of the reasons we try to image every field at least once a day in all filters.
Happy New Year Everyone!