The young star nobody classified

Listed as a 'suspected variable' for decades. Gaia, ZTF and NEOWISE agree: a young star in Perseus whose own disk keeps blotting it out.

NSV 1302 surfaced from Oddsky hunt H-0001 as the only unexplained survivor of 22,125 Gaia-selected fading Sun-like stars. It is a known young star in Per OB2; its data show an irregular disk-occultation 'dipper': 1.2 mag swings in ZTF, chromatic Gaia dips, and a warm infrared excess. A modest result, recorded honestly.

Claims

C1 [observed] Found by Oddsky hunt H-0001 (Gaia-selected fading Sun-like stars) as one of 18 stars with Gaia dips deeper than 0.8 mag on 2+ transits, and the only one of them not already catalogued as an eclipsing binary, a blend, or a variable of known type.
C2 [computed] ZTF g (450 points, 2018-2025) varies irregularly by 1.2 mag (2nd-98th percentile) about a 13.26 median, with no long-term trend (0.004 mag/yr) and no significant period between 1 and 60 days (top power 0.05).
C3 [computed] On Gaia transits BP and RP dim together, dBP/dRP = 1.32 with r = 0.98: chromatic, as dust is, but greyer than interstellar dust, which hints at large grains.
C4 [computed] NEOWISE W1-W2 = 0.43 (median of 21 visits): a strong excess from warm dust, as an inner disk produces.
C5 [inferred] TESS shows 'dips' of 0.7-2.5 mag lasting only 1-3 hours in two sectors. Disk occultations last longer than that; these are treated as probable systematics until checked against target pixels.
C6 [observed] SIMBAD lists the star only as a generic star (''). It appears in a 2015 WISE census of young stellar objects in Per OB2 and in membership lists of young Perseus groups, but no SIMBAD-indexed paper describes its dimming.

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