Eric Mamajek is a professor at the University of Rochester in the United States. He and his graduate student, Mark Pecaut, looked at lots of star light data in the SuperWASP database. Eric and Mark are both experts in finding very young stars, and two signs of a young star are (i) they have lots of star spots which look like black dots on their surface and are cooler regions on the star and (ii) they spin faster than older stars. Our Sun takes about 25 days to spin around once, but young stars take only 2–3 days to spin around. As very young stars spin around, the star spots on their surface come in and out of view, and this changes their light levels by a small amount. By looking at the light given off by these young stars, Eric and Mark can see the brightness change by a small and repeatable amount every time the star spins around, and the SuperWASP database was an ideal place to look for evidence of new stars.
One of the stars they looked at is called J1407, and they saw that the light data from this star looked very strange.

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