Free Astronomy Magazine May-June 2026

17 ASTRO PUBLISHING like this are very rare.” Recognizing the opportunity to study such an event over many months, Zakamska and her team initiated observations with the Gemini South telescope, lo- cated on Cerro Pachón in Chile, as well as the Apache Point Observa- tory 3.5-meter telescope and the 6.5 meter Magellan Telescopes. The findings are published in a paper ap- pearing in The Astronomical Journal . By combining their observations with archival data on J0705+0612, the team determined the star had been occulted, or temporarily obscured by, a vast, slow-moving, cloud of gas and dust. They estimate the cloud is about two billion kilometers (1.2 bil- lion miles) from its host star and roughly 200 million kilometers (120 million miles) in diameter. The data indicate that this cloud is gravita- I n September 2024, a star 3000 light-years away suddenly became 40 times dimmer than usual, and remained so until May 2025. The star, J0705+0612, is similar to our Sun, so its stark dip in brightness caught the attention of Nadia Zakamska, profes- sor of astrophysics at Johns Hopkins University. “Stars like the Sun don’t just stop shining for no reason,” she says, “so dramatic dimming events MAY-JUNE 2026 T his artist’s illustration shows a large disk of planetary debris, surrounded by a thick cloud of dust and gas, passing in front of a star. A team of astronomers used the Gemini High-resolution Optical Spectrograph (GHOST) on the Gemini South tel- escope, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, to measure the motion of the gas within the cloud. This is the first time astronomers have measured the in- ternal gas motions of a disk orbiting a secondary object such as a planet or low-mass star. The finding offers a rare glimpse into the chaotic and dynamic processes still shaping planetary systems long after their formation. [International Gemini Ob- servatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/P. Marenfeld & M. Zamani]