For this week we again remain the Sigma-Ori region, and have a look at the object V510Ori. We have published some details about this object a while back in: A survey for variable young stars with small telescopes – V. Analysis of TX Ori, V505 Ori, and V510 Ori, the HST ULLYSES targets in the σ Ori cluster,
The image above shows the V and I-band data for the star during the 2024-15 observing season. It demonstrates its usual behaviour of variations on different timescales – what is expected for a T-Tauri star. A point of note is our ability to ‘see’ how even the short term behaviour of the source can change. At the start, near the deep dimming event, the light curve looks quite smooth with small variations. Later on, during the second half of the available data the light curve looks much more noisy. This is caused by an increase in the short timescale variability – either by smaller features in the disk passing the line of sight, or features closer to the star (they hence move faster). It is not caused by a change in the noise in the data – the error bars are comparable.
If you noticed the increase in data points near JD=2460640 – then you are right. This is a 2week period where we did run an observing campaign for this field, which was aimed to get some short term variability data for sources in this field. Thank you for participating in this!