Just finished reading the paper. It&#x27;s worth reading - it&#x27;s well written and they&#x27;ve already put a lot of effort into characterizing the star, and modelling&#x2F;ruling out any explanations they could think of.<p>The thing that makes this star _really_ peculiar is the lack of any excess infrared - if there was as much material (dust, asteroids, debris) orbiting the star as you&#x27;d expect from how often&#x2F;how much the star is being occulted (that is, there should be a lot more material on orbits that don&#x27;t intersect with our line of sight) - then there should be quite a bit of excess infrared radiation from all that material, but we don&#x27;t.<p>The most plausible explanation they could come up with is comets - but the profile of the occultation events doesn&#x27;t match comets very well (sharp dip initially corresponding to the optically thick head of the comet, then a slower rise back to normal from the tail).<p>My question regarding the comet hypothesis is - could there even be enough material in the oort cloud to produce the amount of occultation we&#x27;re seeing? Given that Jupiter apparently only occults our sun by 1% and we&#x27;re seeing 22% occultation here, it seems unlikely.<p>You&#x27;d have to assume an average object size to calculate % occultation -&gt; mass of occulting objects, but we should be able to make a reasonable assumption on that from observations in our own solar system. And apparently our own oort cloud has been estimated at a few earth masses, so if that&#x27;s typical we&#x27;ve got a rough upper bound for the amount of material available. I wonder if anyone&#x27;s done that calculation yet.