Nearby Star Has Shady Companion

For nearly 190 years, scientists have argued over what's causing a bright, relatively nearby star known as Epsilon Aurigae to lose its luster every 27 years.

The dimming, which lasts about 18 months, is due to some sort of eclipsing companion. The most likely scenario, however, seemed ridiculously far-fetched: a sibling star of some sort cloaked in a shroud of dark dust and orbiting head-on relative to Earth.

Yet that's exactly what astronomers found using a network of four linked, infrared telescopes to create an instrument that can resolve targets with 100 times the power of the Hubble Space Telescope. The technique, called interferometry, allowed scientists to watch the companion object's silhouette pass across the face of Epsilon Aurigae, confirming the pair's unusual geometry.

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