Sky & Telescope - May 2023 - 11

FUJI I: ROGER W. SINNOTT; DUSTY DISK IN FRONT OF RED
GIANT STAR: ANASTASIOS TZANIDAKIS
OBITUARY
Akira Fujii (1941-2022)
ACCLAIMED ASTROPHOTOGRAPHER
Akira Fujii passed away on December
28, 2022, at age 81. As a Contributing
Photographer to Sky & Telescope since
1991, he worked almost exclusively with
large-format color film. Fujii's widefield
views of the constellations, each
with impeccable star images, have been
a hallmark of this magazine for nearly
four decades.
Astronomy enthusiasts in Japan,
however, have come to know Akira Fujii
in a more expansive way. Born in 1941
in Yamaguchi City, he enrolled as a
young man in the Design Department
of Tama Art University in Tokyo, graduating
in 1961. With this background
he embarked on a lifelong career as publisher,
layout artist, and author of books
and periodicals about the night sky.
These publications included a
popular quarterly magazine, a set of six
children's books about the stars, and 12
hardcover books, issued monthly during
STARS
Astronomers Discover Giant Blinking Star
LONG AFTER IT HAPPENED, astronomers
discovered that a distant Milky
Way star had dimmed for seven years.
Between 2012 and 2018, the bloated
red giant star, located some 26,000
light-years away in the constellation
Sagitta, the Arrow, had become more
than 60 times fainter (a drop of 4.5
magnitudes) than before.
" Stars typically don't do this, " says
Anastasios Tzanidakis (University of
Washington), who reported the find
at the 241st meeting of the American
Astronomical Society. He and colleagues
think that the extremely long and deep
dimming happened when a slowly orbiting
companion, surrounded by a huge
disk of absorbing dust, blocked the red
giant's light.
The European Space Agency's Gaia
mission (S&T: Feb. 2023, p. 34) first
detected the star's strange behavior. In
2017, Gaia saw the star (now known
as Gaia17bpp) begin to brighten, and
it issued an automated alert. Last year,
Tzanidakis and colleagues followed
up on that alert, using archived data
from other telescopes to confirm that
the long and deep eclipse had begun in
2012. Older observations show no other
unexpected behavior back to 1950.
According to the team, the only
viable explanation for the long dimming
is that a huge disk of absorbing
material, spanning 200 to 500 million
kilometers (100 to 300 million miles),
surrounds a faint companion star. The
disk might consist of dust blown into
space by the giant star and subsequently
captured by its companion, or it could
be a debris disk belonging to a white
dwarf star. " We need to do more modeling, "
explains Tzanidakis.
An artist's concept shows a disk-enshrouded
white dwarf blocking some of the light from the
red giant star Gaia17bpp.
sk yand tele scope .o r g * MAY 2023 11
1994, that promoted
sky-watching through
the seasons. A common
feature in these
publications was the
heartwarming caricature
of a panda-like
puppy named Chiro.
The real-life Chiro had
been Fujii's beloved
canine companion for
many years.
From 1974 through
1984, Fujii hosted his
" Invitation to Starlit
Skies " star party on Mount Azuma. This
event often drew 2,000 participants,
many of whom brought homemade
telescopes, and it inspired other, similar
events (S&T: July 2002, p. 64).
When Halley's Comet appeared in
1986, Fujii toured the length of Japan
with his trailer-mounted 24-inch reflector,
offering views of the comet and
other sights to the general public. He
also appeared frequently in NHK TV
broadcasts.
Although his home
for many years was
Kōriyama, Fukushima
prefecture, Fujii spent
much of his time in
the neighboring town
of Shirakawa. There,
he built Chiro Observatory,
which soon
became a gathering spot
for dozens of followers,
each with their own
observing specialty.
In the mid-1990s,
Fujii built his Chiro
Southern Observatory outside Perth, in
Western Australia, thereby putting the
rest of the celestial sphere within his
photographic grasp.
A profoundly humble man, Akira
Fujii attracted many friends with his
dedication. In 1993 the International
Astronomical Union named minor
planet 3872 Akirafujii in his honor.
¢ROGER W. SINNOTT
Read Roger Sinnott's personal remembrances
at https://is.gd/AkiraFujii.
Similar long eclipses have been
reported for other stars, such as Epsilon
Aurigae (S&T: July 2010, p. 16), but
those have repeated within human lifetimes.
The long duration of Gaia17bpp's
eclipse indicates the orbital period of
the obscuring material must be on the
scale of centuries. There could be many
more similar systems out there, Tzanidakis
notes, but we'll need long surveys
of large regions of sky to find them.
¢GOVERT SCHILLING
https://www.is.gd/AkiraFujii
Sky & Telescope - May 2023

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