This week we have a brief look at Gaia19eyy. This is not a young star, but an erupting Be star in one of our fields. We have already written a paper about it, but we keep an eye on it since it got detected. Indeed we have looked at the source occasionally, lastly in weeks 259 and 288.
The last time we looked at it, its eruption was overdue by a few months and it was getting too close to the sun to be detectable. This was in July 2024. In the image above we show the last 3-4 months of B, V, R, and I-band data of the object. We can see it finally had another burst. We are now past the maximum brightness but the object is still above its normal baseline level.
Notably, this latest burst was not just late, it also was shorter and much shallower than the previous ones. According to the Gaia light curve, the last four bursts (since 2019) were all quite strong. The current one is more comparable to earlier burst, 3 of which are detected from 2015-19 in the Gaia data. It is not clear if this is a pattern, but other such objects (like NSW 284) do show a similar behaviour with groups of stronger and weaker bursts.
Lets see what the next bursts are going to do ….