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Old 28-12-2019, 02:11 PM
JA
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JA is offline
 
Join Date: Oct 2016
Location: Melbourne, Australia
Posts: 2,976
Quote:
Originally Posted by billdan View Post
Our ABC published an article about Betelgeuse magnitude variations yesterday.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-...ode3f/11828624
Thanks Bill. I saw that earlier and was going to repost the same chart from Dr Stella Kafka, I think.

It is quite interesting when you look at the variation over say some 30 years of data mostly varying in Magnitude between 0.2 and 1, with infrequent outliers as high as nearly 0 and as low as 1.3 (now-ish), and the very consistent period of one year.

EDIT: given the one year periodicity I'd be interested to know if the maxima/minima were in any way related to our orbital parameters/ position around The Sun and whether it coincided with perihelion / aphelion or .... ?

EDIT #2:OK I just checked ROUGHLY from the graph data (and using a bit of visual interpolation over the years) which shows minimum apparent intensity around the start of each calender year, the same time as closest solar approach: perihelion, or close enough. Who Knows, perhaps it's something on the star itself (logically more likely) rather than something "in between" that accounts for the one year period in the intensity / magnitude data?



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JA

Last edited by JA; 28-12-2019 at 02:35 PM.
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