A giant blinking star was spotted near the center of our Milky Way galaxy by astronomers. Known as VVV-WIT-08, the star is located more than 25,000 light-years away from Earth. It is incredibly rare for a star to blink (growing dim and then brighten again).

According to a new observation, quoted by CNN, the star blinked so much that it disappeared over time. This feature of the star is making the researchers believe that it may belong to a new class – a “blinking giant” binary star system.

What does the probable new class include?

This encapsulates giant stars a hundred times larger than our sun. It is eclipsed every few decades by an unseen companion which could be anything, a planet or another star.

The companion will probably be surrounded by a disk of material that hides the giant star, prompting the blinking observed by astronomers.

According to CNN, the study was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“It’s amazing that we just observed a dark, large and elongated object pass between us and the distant star, and we can only speculate what its origin is,” CNN quoted Sergey Koposov as saying. Koposov is co-author of the study.

“There are certainly more to be found, but the challenge now is in figuring out what the hidden companions are, and how they came to be surrounded by discs, despite orbiting so far from the giant star,” CNN quoted Leigh Smith, discovery lead, as saying.

The dimming phenomenon was observed using the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment.