Sometimes, the source of the dimming turns out to be something else entirely.
The mission has detected dozens of planets this way. WASP looks for potential exoplanets by looking for dimming in the brightness of stars, a signal that an object is passing in front and blocking the light. The star showed up in data from a British-led mission known as the Wide Angle Search for Planets, or WASP. That’s how von Boetticher and his colleagues at the University of Cambridge discovered the smallest star ever measured. For astronomer Alexander von Boetticher, false positives in data are actually a good thing.
