More fun with Aladin - Gaia Alert Gaia18adn

You've probably heard of the European Gaia mission. This special purpose space telescope is tasked with measuring the precise positions and movements in the sky of about a billion sources.  When its mission is complete, we will have a far larger and more accurate catalog of the distances to the stars in our part of the galaxy, as well as how they are moving with respect to us. To achieve this feat, it has to observe each source many times. In addition to precise locations, Gaia can also measure the brightness of astronomical sources, and this includes distant galaxies as well as stars. Gaia has spotted numerous supernovas in other galaxies, as well as a number of other "optical transients." A transient is either an object that appears out of nowhere like a supernova, or objects the brighten or dim dramatically.

When Gaia spots a transient, a photometric science alert is issued, and there have been lots of these. From time to time I browse through them, looking for unusual ones. It's interesting to track down what is known about the source to see what I can learn.

The most recent one that caught my eye was Gaia18adn. You can tell by the first number that it was issued in 2018. This is described as a "red" object. It is close to the galactic plane and doesn't appear to be extended, which means it's probably a star. If we had a measurement of its proper motion, we could know for sure it's not a galaxy, but we don't have that yet. Its Gaia source ID is 2059140431331158272, if you're keeping score.

The Elsie Paper

Note: after this was nearly done,  couple of people pointed out to me the simultaneous release of a preprint by Deeg+ that reaches essentially the same conclusion as the Boyajian+ paper, but uses a different method, and covers all 4 2017 dips.

This post is a slightly updated text version of Wow! Signal Burst 25, which was was being released on the 3rd of January 2018, almost simultaneously with a press release announcing a new paper on Tabby’s Star by Boyajian, et. al., titled The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC8462852 

In a previous post, I went over the events of last summer and into the Fall of 2017.  I recommend that one first if you are unfamiliar with those events, and also to Tabby's Star for the Perplexed. We also had a conversation with astrophysicist Eva Bodman on the Unseen Podcast in October 2017 in which we discussed recent developments.