A strange winking star in the constellation Monoceros may signal the birth of a new planetary system, where clumps of dust, rocks, and possibly even asteroids circle about and intermittently obscure the light from a young sun.
William Herbst, an astronomer at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and his graduate student Kristin Kearns first noticed unusual light variations coming from the faint star, designated KH 15D, while observing the surrounding stellar cluster in 1997.
Unsure of the significance of the blinking, Herbst and several students kept an eye on KH 15D over the following years. "We couldn't predict what it was going to do next, but we knew that it could be something very interesting, so we kept watching," says Catrina Hamilton, an astronomer at nearby Connecticut College who is working on her Ph.D. with Herbst.
The star KH 15D (top) periodically dims by a factor of 25. Are unborn ...
