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This story was originally published by NASA and is unaltered.
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Amateur Astronomers Help Discover Cosmic Crash [1]

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Date: 2023-12

The story began back in 2021, when the All-Sky Automated Survey for Supernovae (ASAS-SN) network noticed that a Sun-like star 1800 light years away was rapidly fading. Some 30 days later, NASA volunteer Arttu Sainio was reading X (formerly Twitter), and caught professional astronomers Dr. Matthew Kenworthy and Dr. Eric Mamajek speculating about this weird event. Arttu decided to further investigate this star, called Asassn-21qj, on his own, using data from NASA’s NEOWISE mission. Arttu was surprised to find that the star had demonstrated an unexpected brightening in infrared light two years before the optical dimming event. So he joined the talk on social media and shared his finding with the two astronomers.

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[1] Url: https://science.nasa.gov/get-involved/citizen-science/amateur-astronomers-help-discover-cosmic-crash/

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