The Adoption

In conjunction with the Tiverton High School Astronomy Classes, I’m adopting the curious star KIC 9832227. 

This star first hit the news in 2017, with a press release from a series of astronomers at Calvin University (in Michigan), describing this star as an eclipsing binary double star. Two stars are orbiting each other, but instead of taking months or years for the two to go around each other, they completed a full orbit in just 11 hours. Further, the Calvin astronomers measured the time needed for each orbit and found that the two stars were speeding up. They concluded that the two stars were actually spiraling toward each other and would collide or merge during the year 2022.

Then, in 2018, the star was again in the news, with a new press release that apologized for the 2017 announcement. Astronomers explained that they had found an error in the way an observation had been copied from the original text, creating a 12-hour mistake in the timing of the double star. Once this error was corrected, instead of an increasing spiral, the astronomers concluded that the timing of the double star was more complex – something they couldn’t readily explain.

 And so we will now “adopt” this star and make our own measurements of its behavior. Our plan is to observe it between November 2019 and the end of the school year in June 2020. We will measure the orbital time, plot the orbital period, and see if we can detect changes in the timing of the star.