The "winking star" KH 15D undergoes 3-week long eclipses every 48 days, possibly due to an intervening "ripple" in a protoplanetary disk blocking the star's light. Measurements from archived sky photos in the Harvard Plate Stacks (right two frames) show that these eclipses are a recent phenomenon, yielding a remarkable opportunity to study planet formation on the short timescale of a single human lifetime. (Josh Winn et al.) JPEG (60K) High Resolution JPEG (1.0M)

The "winking star" KH 15D dims dramatically when undergoing its periodic eclipses. (P. Garnavich, University of Notre Dame) JPEG (31K)

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