Paper time! A paper led by Dane Späth that I’m a co-author on got published today.

A giant star in the open cluster NGC 4349 has previously been reported to have a low-mass brown dwarf companion. However, oddities in the long-term radial velocity and photometric trends of the star made this seem implausible. But nobody had a model to explain it… until now!

We created a model for stellar non-radial oscillations which can be used to explain the odd radial velocity and photometric time series, demonstrating that the brown dwarf candidate is probably just a ‘weird’, non-radial oscillation mode in the star. We also showed that NGC 4349 No. 127 sits in a relatively sparse region of period-luminosity space for giant star planet candidates, suggesting that there could be many more planet candidates around giant stars that are actually also just weird oscillations:

You can check out the paper here.