good candidate or not round?
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by
WizardHowl
I flagged this as a good candidate but 2MASS K - and only this band - show it to be slightly elliptical. I know that seeing conditions can have some impact on the [ground-based] observations so I am prepared to be a little forgiving but I'm still learning. Any thoughts on this?
Although SIMBAD has nothing on this star it seemed so bright and had such a promising SED that I did a little digging and found the NOMAD1 reference: it is NOMAD1 0777-0382397 which is also UCAC2 27493561 and it is considerably brighter in JHK (where it is 5th-6th magnitude) than it is in BVR colours (where it is 14th to 16th magnitude). ( N.B. NOMAD1 lists the JHK from 2MASS). NOMAD1 also gives proper motion for this star as ~8-9 mas/yr in RA and DEC.
My guess is this is an AGB star (one at the end of its lifetime having recently exhausted its supply of hydrogen and having left the main sequence) and, although it might well be surrounded by some dust, any dust is more likely to be shells of material being thrown off rather than a potentially planet-hosting disk. If so, it's more likely to be of interest to people interested in studying formation of planetary nebulae or maser activity than evolution of planetary systems. If I'm wrong (and I've not checked the NOMAD colours of a sample of disk-host stars to know what kind of colour differences to expect), a star this faint in BVR with a low proper motion (and hence likely to be distant) might even be a main-sequence star with a relatively low mass.
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by
abans
scientist, moderator
Nice find! This looks like a potentially good candidate for follow-up to me
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