This week we look at a special friend of the project. The star [NSW2012] 284. This was the first very unusual object we found – I think at some point in 2017 – which puzzled us for a while (several years in fact).
It turned out to be a background star to the Elephant Trunk Nebula target region, and not associated with it. It is, however, reasonably young and massive. After several years, and finding another one of these strange objects, we found out that this is an outbursting Be-type star with a decretion disk. These massive stars rotate very rapidly and eject material from their equatorial region into a disk, which causes the bursts visible in the data. Some of these objects do this repeatatly. All our findings got ultimately published in the paper: A survey for variable young stars with small telescopes: VI – Analysis of the outbursting Be stars NSW 284, gaia 19eyy, and VES 263, in 2023.
In the above plot we show the last three years of V, R, and I-band data for the source. It has kept to its ‘normal’ schedule and created three outbursts over that period. The bursts are now just over 400 days apart, slightly longer than the behaviour we saw in the data analysed in the paper. There are also no ‘failed’, low amplitude, bursts or pauses (no burst), as have been seen in the past. Maybe the next one will be missing – or not. Lets check back in a year or so …