![]() This artist's concept shows a young star surrounded by a dusty protoplanetary disk. Charts are available at various scales from wide to narrow fields of view. Go to the website, type in the star name in the Pick a Star box, and then select Create a Finder Chart. To aid in seeing the fluctuations I use the free charts from the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO). In just the past two weeks (February 1–14) I've seen it vary between 10.5 and 10.0, a difference in brightness readily apparent to the eye when compared with nearby stars of known brightness. But unlike couch potato stars like our Sun, it chaotically bounces up and down between magnitudes 9.5 and 12.6. Click for a larger chart.Ĭourtesy AAVSO with additions by Bob KingĮntangled in the luminous haze of the great nebula's eastern tendril, T Ori typically shines around magnitude 10.5, bright enough to observe in a 3-inch telescope. I've sketched in the gross outline of the Orion Nebula as a guide. Numbers are comparison star magnitudes with the decimal omitted. Use this AAVSO chart to locate and then estimate the brightness of T Ori (open circle at center), so you can follow its ups and downs. Since then it's become a routine part of observing the nebula - and led me to find other stars like it. Similarly, I've looked at the Orion Nebula hundreds of times and never noticed the flickering of T Orionis (Ori) until I stumbled on an article a few years ago describing its chaotic changes in brightness. Unfortunately, he either mistook it as a star, or if he had suspicions about its nature never made follow-up observations. ![]() Galileo, who discovered Jupiter's moons and the starry nature of the Milky Way, also happened upon Neptune more than 200 years before the planet's formal discovery. ![]() One of its nurslings, T Orionis, is a bright, pre-main-sequence star that appears to fluctuate in brightness as we see it peeping through its turbulent birth cloud. At 1,350 light-years from Earth the massive molecular cloud is one of the closest stellar birthplaces. The ESO’s VLT Survey Telescope (VST) captured the gangly Orion Nebula and its associated cluster of young stars. ![]()
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