This is pretty interesting stuff. Probably turn out to be nothing, of course...
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
Quote
In the Northern hemisphere's sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word "lyric."
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
"We'd never seen anything like this star," says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you'd expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler's science team couldn't process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler's astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked "citizen scientists" to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.
In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as "interesting" and "bizarre." The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.
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.
"It looked like the kind of thing you might expect an alien civilization to build."
Boyajian, the Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing the star's bizarre light pattern. Several of the citizen scientists are named as co-authors. The paper explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.
The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star's system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.
But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That's a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.
And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn't show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews "natural" scenarios. "But," she said, there were "other scenarios" she was considering.
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."
Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they'll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth's network of radio stations.
Assuming all goes well, the first observation would take place in January, with the follow-up coming next fall. If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner. "If we saw something exciting, we could ask the director for special allotted time on the VLA," Wright told me. "And in that case, we'd be asking to go on right away."
In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky, aimed between the swan and the lyre, where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days.
Tim would have had a better title, something like - Alien Mega structures Found In Space :P
The other possibility, which isn't really discussed in the article, is new physics. It could be our understanding of the evolution of that particular star system is incomplete and there's something different going on.
Quote from: crazy canuck on October 15, 2015, 01:12:55 PM
Tim would have had a better title, something like - Alien Mega structures Found In Space :P
Obviously it's a Dyson sphere.
QuoteKepler's astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked "citizen scientists" to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.
This is why scientists fail. Unlike doctors and lawyers they don't understand that maintaining guild privileges is paramount.
Quote
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."
I expect alien civilizations to build stone pyramids on Earth, but YMMV.
If it's a Dyson ball it has to be of gargantuan size.
LOL Dyson Sphere!
More of a Dyson Swarm.
Quote from: crazy canuck on October 15, 2015, 01:12:55 PM
Tim would have had a better title, something like - Alien Mega structures Found In Space :P
That was pretty much the headline on the article I read about this :lol:
But it would be super interesting if it was aliens. I've often theorised that there are probably no advanced aliens because if there were we would have seen their ultra scale engineering.
Given it is very possible that radio waves are only used for a short time in a civilization's existence it seems that this could be the only way to spot them
Death Star?
Quote from: frunk on October 15, 2015, 01:16:49 PM
The other possibility, which isn't really discussed in the article, is new physics. It could be our understanding of the evolution of that particular star system is incomplete and there's something different going on.
Possible, but it seems rather unlikely in that if that is the case, why is this the only star where we see this behavior?
Quote from: Berkut on October 15, 2015, 02:10:12 PM
Possible, but it seems rather unlikely in that if that is the case, why is this the only star where we see this behavior?
It's the only star that we see with this behavior, which is quite different from saying it is the only star with this behavior. Stellar mapping is an ongoing and large project that most likely will never be completed. 150,000 stars sounds like a lot, but compare that to the hundreds of billions of stars estimated for just the Milky Way. If it is a natural phenomena there's good odds we can find other stars with this behavior. The mapping tends to start with the ones that look the most interesting, which means we could be missing phenomena that we don't know exists.
I studied astrophysics. I like to think there's no surprise for me out there.
Quote from: crazy canuck on October 15, 2015, 01:12:55 PM
Tim would have had a better title, something like - Alien Mega structures Found In Space :P
Yes, a pathetic effort indeed. :mad:
As for the theory that a star passed through the system and fucked it up by drawing in the systems Oort cloud and causing collisions, that would have had to be recent as the article notes, so recent that we should be able to look at the surrounding stellar neighborhood and figure which star did the deed, if that is what happened. If we can't find such a star, then the alien hypothesis seems much stronger.
They have in fact looked around and found a star that might have done the deed.
And I don't really much care to meet your lefty standards for thread creation on Languish. Like...ever.
Quote from: Berkut on October 15, 2015, 04:28:34 PM
They have in fact looked around and found a star that might have done the deed.
And I don't really much care to meet your lefty standards for thread creation on Languish. Like...ever.
Yes, I saw that at Slate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/10/14/weird_star_strange_dips_in_brightness_are_a_bit_baffling.html
Quote
The last idea the astronomers looked at was a series of comets orbiting the star. These could be surrounded by clouds of gas and other material that could produce the dips seen. The lack of IR is puzzling in that case, but not too damning. If another star happened to pass nearby, then its gravity could disturb the first star's Oort cloud, the region billions of kilometers out where we think most (if not all) stars have billions of icy objects. This disturbance could send these ice chunks flying down toward the star, where they could break up, creating all those weird dips—ices in them would heat up, blow off as a gas, and could explain the odd shapes of the dips detected, too.
And, as it happens, there is another star pretty close to KIC 8462852; a small red dwarf about 130 billion kilometers out. That's close enough to affect the Oort cloud.
This doesn't close the case, though. Comets are a good guess, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where they could completely block 22 percent of the light from a star; that's a huge amount. Really huge.
Are my thread creation standards leftist? :unsure:
What makes a thread creation standards leftist, or centrist or rightist for that matter? :huh:
It seems to me that Berkut has recently been more nasty.
Quote from: jimmy olsen on October 15, 2015, 04:35:58 PM
Quote from: Berkut on October 15, 2015, 04:28:34 PM
They have in fact looked around and found a star that might have done the deed.
And I don't really much care to meet your lefty standards for thread creation on Languish. Like...ever.
Yes, I saw that at Slate.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/10/14/weird_star_strange_dips_in_brightness_are_a_bit_baffling.html
Quote
The last idea the astronomers looked at was a series of comets orbiting the star. These could be surrounded by clouds of gas and other material that could produce the dips seen. The lack of IR is puzzling in that case, but not too damning. If another star happened to pass nearby, then its gravity could disturb the first star's Oort cloud, the region billions of kilometers out where we think most (if not all) stars have billions of icy objects. This disturbance could send these ice chunks flying down toward the star, where they could break up, creating all those weird dips—ices in them would heat up, blow off as a gas, and could explain the odd shapes of the dips detected, too.
And, as it happens, there is another star pretty close to KIC 8462852; a small red dwarf about 130 billion kilometers out. That's close enough to affect the Oort cloud.
This doesn't close the case, though. Comets are a good guess, but it's hard to imagine a scenario where they could completely block 22 percent of the light from a star; that's a huge amount. Really huge.
Are my thread creation standards leftist? :unsure:
What makes a thread creation standards leftist, or centrist or rightist for that matter? :huh:
How would they go about trying to calculate the direction of this star's movement? (is it possible?)
Considering the distances involved I doubt they can just sit and watch....
Quote from: Berkut on October 15, 2015, 04:28:34 PMAnd I don't really much care to meet your lefty standards for thread creation on Languish. Like...ever.
:lol:
Quote from: Martinus on October 15, 2015, 04:44:18 PM
It seems to me that Berkut has recently been more nasty.
Marti. It was a joke.
Quote from: PRC on October 15, 2015, 01:39:56 PM
More of a Dyson Swarm.
Maybe it's still under construction. :P
Quote from: Tyr on October 15, 2015, 04:46:51 PM
How would they go about trying to calculate the direction of this star's movement? (is it possible?)
Considering the distances involved I doubt they can just sit and watch....
Sitting and watching is pretty much all they can do. Whatever events are happening near this star they happened quite a while ago. Belasarius was still working for Justinian when whatever we are looking at occurred.
I wonder if there was some sort of conversation along these lines:
"Hi, this is Andy from the press office. Really excited about this paper. We can do something big with this. It will make a splash."
"That's great! When can we see the press release?"
"Yeah so about that. Like I said, I think we can do something with the research paper, but it just needs one little ingredient...
"Go on."
"How comfortable are you with mentioning aliens?"
Are they seriously suggesting that something like this is going on?
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fi62.photobucket.com%2Falbums%2Fh101%2FMonoriu%2Fhuman_space_station_zpsdhe6cyej.jpg&hash=179cf8745d7294547ebaf588b9f2ad107aa80bc5) (http://s62.photobucket.com/user/Monoriu/media/human_space_station_zpsdhe6cyej.jpg.html)
So is this the modern equivalent of the Mars Canals?
Quote from: Berkut on October 15, 2015, 02:10:12 PM
Quote from: frunk on October 15, 2015, 01:16:49 PM
The other possibility, which isn't really discussed in the article, is new physics. It could be our understanding of the evolution of that particular star system is incomplete and there's something different going on.
Possible, but it seems rather unlikely in that if that is the case, why is this the only star where we see this behavior?
Your scientists have yet to discover how neural networks create self-consciousness, let alone how the human brain processes two-dimensional retinal images into the three-dimensional phenomenon known as perception. Yet you somehow brazenly declare that seeing is believing!
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fvignette4.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fstarwars%2Fimages%2F2%2F20%2FDeathStarII-BotF.jpg%2Frevision%2Flatest%3Fcb%3D20140508162403&hash=8f81edea1ef541b4eca445804d7b11dd19032cd4)?
Quote from: jimmy olsen on October 15, 2015, 04:35:58 PM
Are my thread creation standards leftist? :unsure:
What makes a thread creation standards leftist, or centrist or rightist for that matter? :huh:
That was meant to say "hefty" standards.
Quote from: Berkut on October 16, 2015, 08:28:50 AM
Quote from: jimmy olsen on October 15, 2015, 04:35:58 PM
Are my thread creation standards leftist? :unsure:
What makes a thread creation standards leftist, or centrist or rightist for that matter? :huh:
That was meant to say "hefty" standards.
I was wondering about that, so the typo was part of the joke?
This explanation deserves its own thread. :P
I am just glad somebody has finally taken Tim to task for his ceaseless left-wing propaganda.
The comet theory has been disproven. :menace:
http://www.cnet.com/news/the-weird-star-system-scientists-have-been-checking-for-aliens-just-got-weirder/
Quote
Weird star system scientists have been checking for aliens just got weirder
Last year, scientists spotted something strange going on around a distant star. Now it turns out it's been happening for decades, or even centuries, making it even harder to explain.
by Eric Mack @ericcmack
January 15, 2016 12:30 PM PST Updated: January 16, 2016 7:14 AM PST
There is a star, unimpressively named KIC 8462852, that sits 1,400 light-years away and seems to be relatively similar to our own sun. But whatever circles that star is so weird and unprecedented that respected scientists concede far-fetched explanations like "alien megastructures" cannot be completely ruled out. A new analysis of observations of the star dating back to the 19th century shows that the weirdness around it has been happening for decades, if not centuries, and could rule out the leading natural explanation.
To date, the most likely scenario seemed to be that a swarm of giant comets might be passing in front of the star, but one veteran astronomer now says the star has also been growing consistently dimmer since at least 1890. That's a completely new level of weirdness that's tough to pin on just comets, especially when combined with the more recent strangeness that first brought the star to our attention.
Bradley E. Schaefer, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University, went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to examine Harvard University's archival photographic plates that include about half a million photographs of the sky on glass plates taken between 1890 and 1989. He found that the light observed from KIC 8462852 consistently and significantly faded over the course of almost a complete century of observations.
"The KIC 8462852 light curve from 1890 to 1989 shows a highly significant secular trend in fading over 100 years, with this being completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star," reads a paper by Schaefer that's been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available in its pre-peer review draft form here. "Such stars should be very stable in brightness, with evolution making for changes only on time scales of many millions of years."
KIC 8462852 first came to our attention last year, several months after it had first been flagged by volunteer citizen scientists who use the online platform Planet Hunters to eyeball light curve data for distant stars spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope.
Tabetha Boyajian, a Yale postdoc who is also on the Planet Hunters science team, spearheaded a group that published a paper detailing the oddly significant and irregular dips in light observed from the star, which would fade by as much as 20 percent for as long as a whole day.
Boyajian's paper didn't mention alien megastructures, instead suggesting that something natural, like swarms of large comets, might be passing in front of the star and blocking its light. But she also shared the team's data and analysis with other scientists like Penn State's Jason Wright, an authority on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and hypothetical alien megastructures like the Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm.
The SETI Institute and other scientific organizations trained their telescopes on the star in the months that followed, but so far have failed to find any evidence of alien signals coming from the system.
But Schaefer's new look at the old observations of KIC 8462852 casts doubt on what has been the leading scientific hypothesis for the system's weirdness since it was first noted.
Let's just break down how odd this is real quick. Kepler, which observed the star over the course of a few recent years in the 21st century, finds that there are some very large objects passing in front of it at irregular intervals. Then Schaefer goes back and looks at the astronomical equivalent of the dusty old microfiche machines in the back of the library and finds that it has also been getting slowly dimmer for about as long as we've been watching it (or at least the area of the sky that it's in), which is the exact opposite of how stars like our sun normally behave.
"This star is really weird; normal main sequence stars slowly increase in luminosity as they age, on time scales of hundreds of millions of years. A star that gets 20 percent dimmer in a century is unprecedented," Massimo Marengo told me. He's one of the Iowa State researchers who backed the comet swarm hypothesis in a paper published in November.
This pokes a hole in the theory that big comets are causing the big dips we're seeing in the star's light.
"With 36 giant comets required to make the one 20 percent Kepler dip, and all of these along one orbit, we would need 648,000 giant-comets to create the century-long fading," Schaefer writes. "I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant comets to exist around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century. So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips."
I contacted Boyajian to see what she thought of the newly revisited history of "her" star (KIC 8462852 is informally referred to as "Tabby's Star" in astronomy circles) and she told me she has discussed it with Schaefer and is intrigued by what he found. And more baffled than ever by the phenomenon.
"I think this new analysis is very exciting. It is the second piece of evidence we now have that says what is happening to the star is very unusual (the first being the Kepler light curve). However, it does not help the case for the comet hypothesis, nor point us into any obvious direction to pursue next."
Marengo told me he agrees that the comet swarm seems a less likely explanation for all the dimming, but he thinks a ring around the star of a certain shape and composition might explain all the weirdness.
"Note that eccentric geometrically thin circumstellar rings around stars similar to KIC 8462852 are not unprecedented: Fomalhaut has one."
Throughout my reporting on this bizarre star system, every scientist I've contacted always reiterates that the "alien megastructures" explanation should be a "hypothesis of last resort," and so far there is no actual evidence besides what are basically unexplained shadows to point in that direction. Still, it's hard not to let the imagination run wild, or at least take a brisk jog around the block. Do the photographic plates from Harvard show a centuries-long construction project on a scale beyond human capability happening around a distant star?
Probably not, but until we get more evidence of what's really going on, it's not impossible.
"I don't know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis, except that it would *seem* to exclude a lot of natural explanations, including comets," Jason Wright wrote in an email to CNET on Thursday.
Wright notes that "since no one uses photographic plates any more, it's basically a lost art...also, the data are very noisy." But, he adds, "Schaefer is an expert at this stuff, though."
The Fading Sun indicates that we must forsake the way of technology.
This is NOT aliens.
(https://languish.org/forums/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fvignette3.wikia.nocookie.net%2Fhorrorclix%2Fimages%2F9%2F90%2FTrust-me-its-aliens-brah.jpg%2Frevision%2Flatest%3Fcb%3D20130202043150&hash=1c56afd724e67fa3a1a64733cda11d7ace138248)