Mysterious Dust-emitting Object Orbiting TIC 400799224
Brian P. Powell, Veselin Kostov, Saul Rappaport, Andrei Tokovinin, Avi, Shporer, Karen Collins, Hank Corbett, Tamas Borkovits, Bruce Gary, Eugene, Chiang, Joseph Rodriguez, Nicholas Law, Thomas Barclay, Robert Gagliano,, Andrew Vanderburg, Greg Olmschenk, Ethan Kruse

TL;DR
This paper reports the discovery of a dust-emitting object orbiting a binary star system, exhibiting irregular dips in brightness likely caused by a sporadically-emitted dust cloud, with implications for understanding disintegrating minor planets.
Contribution
First identification of a dust-emitting object orbiting a binary star, with detailed analysis of its sporadic occultation events and potential disintegrating asteroid nature.
Findings
Dips occur periodically every ~19.77 days.
Dips are sporadic, appearing in 1 out of 3-5 transits.
The dust cloud blocks up to 75% of the star's light.
Abstract
We report the discovery of a unique object of uncertain nature -- but quite possibly a disintegrating asteroid or minor planet -- orbiting one star of the widely separated binary TIC 400799224. We initially identified the system in data from TESS Sector 10 via an abnormally-shaped fading event in the light curve (hereafter 'dips'). Follow-up speckle imaging determined that TIC 400799224 is actually two stars of similar brightness at 0.62" separation, forming a likely bound binary with projected separation of ~300 au. We cannot yet determine which star in the binary is host to the dips in flux. ASAS-SN and Evryscope archival data show that there is a strong periodicity of the dips at ~19.77 days, leading us to believe that an occulting object is orbiting the host star, though the duration, depth, and shape of the dips vary substantially. Statistical analysis of the ASAS-SN data shows…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
