This reminds me vaguely of the community science project I contributed to a few years ago trying to investigate why epsilon Aurigae [0] goes dim every ~27 years

This reminds me vaguely of the community science project I contributed to a few years ago trying to investigate why epsilon Aurigae [0] goes dim every ~27 years. It turns out to be a likely dust disk of an orbiting body that dims the main star and happens to be directly along the line of sight with Earth. I imagine there are a lot of possible ways a line of site occlusion could cause a dim star to appear as not existing at all, and as another commenter mentions, maybe the original measurement was some sort of amplification in the first place. Space is damn cool. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Aurigae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epsilon_Aurigae