* Astronomy

Title: Brightness variations of the FUor-type eruptive star V346 Nor
Author: A. Kóspál, P. Abrahám, Ch. Westhues, M. Haas

Decades after the beginning of its FU Orionis-type outburst, V346 Nor unexpectedly underwent a fading event of delta K = 4.6 mag around 2010. We obtained near-infrared observations and re-analysed data from the VISTA/VVV survey to outline the brightness evolution. In our VLT/NaCO images, we discovered a halo of scattered light around V346~Nor with a size of about 0.04 arcsec (30 au). The VISTA data outlined a well-defined minimum in the light curve at late 2010/early 2011, and tentatively revealed a small-amplitude periodic modulation of 58 days. Our latest data points from 2016 demonstrate that the source is still brightening but has not reached the 2008 level yet. We used a simple accretion disk model with varying accretion rate and line-of-sight extinction to reproduce the observed near-infrared magnitudes and colours. We found that before 2008, the flux changes of V346 Nor were caused by a correlated change of extinction and accretion rate, while the minimum around 2010 was mostly due to decreasing accretion. The source reached a maximal accretion rate of \approx 10^-4 solar masses yr^-1 in 1992. A combination of accretion and extinction changes was already invoked in the literature to interpret the flux variations of certain embedded young eruptive stars.

Read more (891kb, PDF)