Did We Just Discover an Alien Super Structure

[Cerebus]

The Atlantic:  The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.

It appears to be mature.  

And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.

---

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Long, long way from anything close to proof.  However, this is pretty interesting.

For discussion, a civilization able to build a Dyson Sphere would be able to harvest either planets or entire asteroid belts in order to get enough material to build it, and could probably travel between solar systems as you probably don't want to build one around you own home star.

Compared to them we're insects.

[KingDL1]

interesting 

[Cerebus]

CNN: Dimming star remains mystery, but it's likely not caused by comets

Quote

Remember that space anomaly of the dimming star that had everyone crying "aliens"? Well, it's still as mysterious as ever.

---

But the probability of a comet family creating the erratic dip in brightness is highly unlikely, Schaefer said.

"The century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets... all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century," he writes in the research paper.

---

Ordinarily, a star will dip in brightness as planets pass by them, but KIC 8462852 has displayed irregular fluctuations of light that sometimes decreasing by as much as 20% in brightness.

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (SETI) started monitoring Tabby's star after NASA's Kepler team vetted the data showing the unusual light patten.

In November, SETI's senior astronomer Seth Shostak told CNN they hadn't picked up any radio signals from the star system. But that doesn't rule out intelligent life in KIC 8462852.

"There is estimated to be in our galaxy alone a trillion planets. And we can see 100 billion galaxies," Shostak said. "It's believed that one in 10 stars may have a habitable world capable of supporting life."

Still don't know what it is.  Could be aliens?  We have no clue.

 

ETA: A few things that I think are exciting about this:

1) It's been PROGRESSIVELY getting dimmer for about 100 years, with the fluctuations that means it is not just losing power.  Something is blocking it a little more and more over time.

2) 22% dimming is incredible.  The mass of Jupiter would block out 1% of the stars light, so something with the combined mass of 20 Jupiters is causing this.  

3) There is no star wobble.  If it was something like a brown dwarf passing in front of it the star we can see clearly would wobble.  

4) It's not running out of fuel, it's spectral signature isn't changing.  

5) The star is ~1500 light years away.  Whatever is causing the stars light to dim in our telescopes right now actually happened around the time the Eastern and Western Roman Empires split.  

Edited January 19, 2016 by Cerebus

[EagleMBA]

I find this extremely interesting. My main hobby for many years was astronomy and that was my first college major...then it dawned on me that I couldn't get through life without making a living. I hope some day we find out that this is more than just a natural phenomenon so I can meet my ultimate soulmate (picture below).