This week we look at the young star V1174Ori. It is situated in the south of the Orion Nebula and classified as an Orion Variable. This means it varies irregularly in brightness – at least in principle.
We just stumbled across this object by looking at the light curve shown in the plot above. The light curve is basically flat with some small variation. However, at gular intervals, there deep dimming events – almost a magnitude deep, in all filters. In our data the dimming events are 29 days apart. Thus, one could naively assume that this is an eclipsing binary with a 29 or 58day period, depending if we also see the secondary eclipses or not.
However, this seems to no be quite right. Our data is basically taken once a day, at almost the same time every day. Hence, if the eclipses are very short, then we would miss most of these. Indeed, if one looks up the period for the object, it is listed as 2.635d (or half that). The 29 days would hence mean that we only see every 11th eclipse and miss all the other ones as they happen at times we do not observe.
Thus, it will be worth phase folding the light curve with the two periods to check which one is correct. I will do this at some point if I have a bit of time 😉