Do you remember the strange double period object we looked at in week 306 and week 268? It did show show for several years a behaviour that indicated two periodic variations with almost two day periods. As a results the light curve looked like an interference pattern. We have so far no working explanation of the nature of this. Every explanation we have so far come up with seems to be contradicted by some aspects of the data.
If you now think – “ah, a new post, hence they have found an answer” – you will be disappointed 🙂 . However, we show some of the data for the object from the last observing season in the plot above. While the beating pattern is still kind of visible, the amplitudes have changed and are much lower now. And later on (not shown) the pattern seems to have gone almost completely. Thus, maybe the change in the pattern can help us to understand what is going on. Clearly a detailed analysis should be done and we need to keep observing to see if and when the pattern returns.