Intriguing New Development on Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852)

originally posted by: pteridine

originally posted by: Bedlam
Maybe the star had something unusual occur. Like ingesting a black hole.

Actually, the black hole would be ingesting the star. In this event, wouldn't there be an net emission of radiation as the star was eaten? Could the star be running out of mass?

They looked carefully for companion stars to KIC 8462852. They found a fairly distant red dwarf, but no black hole. A black hole consuming Tabby's Star would produce x-rays. An x-ray survey including this star turned up nothing.

originally posted by: pteridine

originally posted by: Bedlam
Maybe the star had something unusual occur. Like ingesting a black hole.

Actually, the black hole would be ingesting the star. In this event, wouldn't there be an net emission of radiation as the star was eaten? Could the star be running out of mass?

I'm not sure exactly WHAT happens to a star that eats a hypermass.

I could see it dropping the core pressure, which would slow the fusion rate. After a few hundred years, it would start to show in the chromosphere.

originally posted by: Ross 54

They looked carefully for companion stars to KIC 8462852. They found a fairly distant red dwarf, but no black hole. A black hole consuming Tabby's Star would produce x-rays. An x-ray survey including this star turned up nothing.

A black hole orbiting the star and consuming surface material would. But what if you dropped a slow moving one that goes in and just farts around in the inner parts of the star?

a reply to: Bedlam

How does a star "eat" a black hole ? I thought black holes were the masters of space devouring anything and everything, you know top of the food chain of space ?

Maybe


A large orbiting planet for whatever reason came apart and created a large asteroid belt that from our angle may have now obscured our view?

originally posted by: Discotech
a reply to: Bedlam

How does a star "eat" a black hole ? I thought black holes were the masters of space devouring anything and everything, you know top of the food chain of space ?

I'm thinking more 'swallow'. Like, the hole's dropping in, and into the star it goes, orbiting the core within the photosphere. Like you eating a live weasel or something.

a reply to: Bedlam

I don't see the picture you're trying to paint with words, can you paint a picture instead ?

originally posted by: Discotech
a reply to: Bedlam

I don't see the picture you're trying to paint with words, can you paint a picture instead ?

Not without a digitizing tablet. Consider. You have a very slow incoming small hypermass. It drops through the system, encounters the star, and goes into orbit inside the star's radiation zone. Down there, the x-ray emission is absorbed by the star's mass and re-radiated as heat. You might not even be able to tell there was something in there, unless maybe the thing had a really elliptical orbit. But it's hoovering up some of the core pressure. It's cold. And it would disrupt magnetic fields.

a reply to: Bedlam

So you mean like a mini blackhole ? stuck around the "core" of the star ?

Now I'm no astrophysicist but wouldn't it eventually grow in size to envelop the whole star ?

And wouldn't the gravitational force of the star keep it from escaping before it grows too large ?

Maybe it is a blackhole, but instead it just glanced far away enough past the star enough to suck up some of the light but not enough to devour it all ?

Or like I said earlier, it's a blackhole that came between the star and our field of view and distorted the light making it appear like it was dimming ?

How about a rogue planet like Jupiter in line with the observations? The debris field around that would have to big but nowhere as large as required to create the effect on the remote star. Since it reappears it MUST be rotating around some thing.

originally posted by: Discotech
a reply to: Bedlam

So you mean like a mini blackhole ? stuck around the "core" of the star ?

Now I'm no astrophysicist but wouldn't it eventually grow in size to envelop the whole star ?

And wouldn't the gravitational force of the star keep it from escaping before it grows too large ?

It would take a while. Maybe a long time. Just looping around in there, bleeding off the core pressure. Eventually it'll become unstable and collapse, then you get a nova, I'd guess.

a reply to: Bedlam

wouldnt it burst out with energy?

a reply to: ItCameFromOuterSpace

If a large, rocky, and probably geologically inert world had been cracked apart by a comet strike, it is possible that its orbit would be populated by the largest of its remains, in a thick ring around the star in question.

a reply to: SpongeBeard

I think any Dyson Sphere is going to start out as a Dyson Swarm

Not necessarily , to encase a star with a Dyson Sphere is impractical if you consider the size of stars , the resources needed would be immense plus you have the problems with stability of the structure and maintenance.
A Dyson swarm could give you all of the benefits without the associated problems , plus if it's your parent star you wouldn't want to encase it anyway.

Fragments of a broken-up planet were considered as a possible explanation for the dimming of Tabby's Star. They found that so much dust would have been created, that we should have been able to detect it. They looked repeatedly, but no such dust was found.
As far as I can determine, Freeman Dyson never thought in terms of a solid shell for a Dyson sphere. As a physicist, he would have known that this couldn't be sustainable. He seems to have had in mind what is meant by the term Dyson swarm.
In the case of the Tabby's Star system, the large F3 star that could be partially surrounded by a Dyson swarm may not be anyone's home star. The red dwarf companion star might be the host of any life in this system.

Just for the sake of discussion, let's assume an intelligent life form had evolved to a level in which they had mastered space travel. It could also be safe to assume that they may amassed a large population by this time and were ready to expand and colonize other planets. It may have taken a very long time to reach this stage in their evolutionary development and their parent star may be approaching an end to its life cycle. Rather than, or they may have already, colonize any planets within their solar system, they look for another suitable system with a younger star so their species will have longer and better survival prospects. They find such a star but it does not have a planet within the proper position. They could then embark upon a long term plan to design and build their own habitat in the form of a ring rather than a sphere.

A fabricated structure would have to be made considering the best usage of all materials involved and would likely not be of sufficient mass to generate the same gravitation field as a planet. This would necessitate the need for the entire structure to be orbited about its star at a rate which would induce sufficient centrifugal force as to simulate a gravity field. This would not be practical with a spherical structure. This ring would therefore completely encircle its star, but would not necessarily be set on a singular constant angle with respect its equator.
Oh yes, I do realize I am talking about a structure which could easily be 10000 miles wide, 1000 miles thick, and almost 565 million miles in circumference; moving in an orbit around a star. This would be a marvelous accomplishment for any life form but could be the long term answer to acquiring living space for its population. As most of the volume of this structure would be open space, the maintenance of the atmosphere would be a prime priority. Since it is an artificial habitat, there would be no natural resources, they would be dependent upon gathering material from the surrounding area of space for any manufacturing to be done. I would guess the recycling of materials will be of paramount importance and waste would not be encouraged as it is with the terrestrial societies I currently know about.
The inner surface of the ring would, of course, be utilized to gather the energy from the sunlight which shown upon it, thus lowering the amount of light which would be perceived by others looking in the direction of this star. Dependent upon the needs of the inhabitants, the width and depth of such a ring structure could easily be enlarged over time until the life of the star again became a factor.
This would be a much better scenario for the expansion of a civilization than simply hopping from one star system to another. While there would be engineering and construction challenges; there would not be the need for conquest of new lands and/or the chance encounter with unknown predators’ or deadly pathogenic viruses or bacteria.
This is, of course, my own thoughts on how a “civilized” civilization could move across the universe without the need for clashes with others.
Also, this would seem to be as valid a possible explaination, even as far out as it may be, as most any other; until the true nature of this mystery is found.

originally posted by: eriktheawful
What would be telling is that amount of dimming increasing over time. It could mean something being built that is covering up more and more of the star's light.

That would be really suggestive.

The whole: "We listed to it with radio receivers and didn't detect anything, there for it's natural" thing doesn't sit well with me.

It could easily be that there is someone there but they use a different form of communication that we can't detect, or moved on from using the EM spectrum, and could have done it long ago, to where now, there is nothing to detect. All radio waves from them have come and gone.

Personally I think they should keep the door open on KIC 8462852

We have to keep in mind, that assuming it were an alien civilization, they'd likely have gotten telescopes able to detect nearby planet atmospheres, and tell of likely inhabited worlds nearby. Knowing of a nearby possibly inhabited world like ours, they could've chosen to become silent to postpone the time of detection from our side as late as possible.

originally posted by: gortex
a reply to: SpongeBeard


A Dyson swarm could give you all of the benefits without the associated problems , plus if it's your parent star you wouldn't want to encase it anyway.

What I'm wondering about dyson swarms is: are the swarm component orbits stable? or do you need correction with propellant from time to time?

If it needs propellant use, there might not be issue for millions of years, but say around a star that lasts trillions of years, won't all that propellant use add up? can it be maintained for trillions of years if its components need to use propellant to stabilize position?

a reply to: Ross 54

This is great news!
.:.Dyson Swarm is key.:.
"The variant closest to Dyson's original conception is the "Dyson swarm". It consists of a large number of independent constructs (usually solar power satellites and space habitats) orbiting in a dense formation around the star. This construction approach has advantages: components could be sized appropriately, and it can be constructed incrementally.[5] Various forms of wireless energy transfer could be used to transfer energy between components and Earth.

Disadvantages resulting from the nature of orbital mechanics would make the arrangement of the orbits of the swarm extremely complex. The simplest such arrangement is the Dyson ring, in which all such structures share the same orbit. More-complex patterns with more rings would intercept more of the star's output, but would result in some constructs eclipsing others periodically when their orbits overlap.[10] Another potential problem is the increasing loss of orbital stability when adding more elements increases the probability of orbital perturbations.

As noted below, such a cloud of collectors would alter the light emitted by the star system. However, the disruption compared to a star's overall natural emitted spectrum would most likely be too small to be noticed on Earth"
Dyson Swarm

For the mechanics of a swarm a decent read is Neal Stephenson's Seveneves . A (very) brief synopsis:

The Moon breaks apart and eventually peppers the Earth with a "Hard Rain" that wipes out everything. Prior the world's nations band together and launch a few thousand people into earth orbit to survive the coming rain. Only seven women manage to survive (The Seven Eves), but out of their ingenuity arises a space-based civilization that mines the asteroid belt to build a ring around the Earth. 20,000 years later they attempt to re-populate a recovering Earth, with much ensuing insanity and mayhem.

I realize the novel is talking an earth ring, not a sun ring, but the mechanics of their survival is an interesting read and some of the percepts may apply to the current discussion. Stephenson's novels are meaty reads and very captivating for those with sufficient patience to read them.

a reply to: Xenogears

What I'm wondering about dyson swarms is: are the swarm component orbits stable? or do you need correction with propellant from time to time?

My guess would be that a civilization that needs to build a Dyson swarm would have moved beyond the need for propellant , perhaps the components of the sphere would be solar powered.