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

An orderly pattern in the dips in light output from the star KIC 8462852 has been observed, and reported in a scientific paper. This alone raises an interesting question.
What sort astrophysical phenomenon can have arrayed matter along an orbit around this star in this particular way?

The intervals between the dips are multiples of 48 &1/2 days. Not all of the multiples, mind, but only a select few. Moreover, certain intervals are repeated.
So, we have spaces between the dips of 6 times 48 days, 15 times, and even just 48 days by itself, each occurring twice in the record. These account for 6 out of eight intervals between the dips in light output from this star.

The Daily Galaxy reproduced some data from recent investigations..

Boyajian and her colleagues considered a number of possible explanations, including variations in the star's output, the aftermath of an Earth/Moon type planetary collision, interstellar clumps of dust passing between the star and earth, and some kind of disruption by the star's apparent dwarf companion. However, none of their scenarios could explain all of the observations. Their best explanation was a giant comet that fragmented into a cascade of thousands of smaller comets. (This hypothesis took a hit when the LSU study was announced because it could not explain a century-long dimming.) The Kepler telescope is no longer collecting data in the Cygnus region, but Hippke reports that the mystery has captured the imagination of amateur astronomers around the world so thousands of them are pointing their telescopes at Tabby's star, snapping images and sending them to the American Association of Variable Star Observers in hopes of detecting further dips that will shed new light on this celestial mystery.

www.dailygalaxy.com...< br />
This TED talk was published last month.. The most mysterious star in the universe | Tabetha Boyajian

a reply to: skywatcher44

I love this mystery. Whatever it is, it's interesting, and things we can't easily explain are what makes life in many respects worth living imo. That said, I hope they solve the riddle in our life time. I'd love to know. Even if it's just something painfully mundane.

Peace.

a reply to: Astyanax
Most likdly robots building that. Wonder if AI took over? Maybe better to not get their attention.

Observers for the American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) have recently reported a couple of interesting variations in the light output of Tabby's Star. On May 4th, one observer reports a brief dip in brightness of about 0.5 magnitude, which is somewhat larger than any of those found by the Kepler Space Telescope.

Another observer reported a very large brightening of this star on May 16th; about 6 magnitudes. No substantial brightening incidents on this star have been discerned before.

If these reports stand up to scrutiny, they will offer substantiation that KIC 84462852 has, indeed, earned its title, as 'The most mysterious star in the galaxy'.

Just to add to the topic... which I believe was posted somewhere on ATS last year..

"100,000 of the most promising galaxy images." Only 50 of them show possible aliens ...running around ...

article from 20 Apr , 2015

And while they didn’t find any obvious signs of a Type II civilization or Dyson Spheres in any of them, they did find around 50 candidates that showed unusually high levels of mid-infrared radiation. The next step will be to confirm whether or not these signs are due to natural astronomical processes, or could be an indication of a highly advanced civilization tapping their parent star for energy.

LINK www.universetoday.com...



This is a false-color image of the mid-infrared emission from the Great Galaxy in Andromeda, as seen by Nasa's WISE space telescope. The orange color represents emission from the heat of stars forming in the galaxy's spiral arms. The G-HAT team used images such as these to search 100,000 nearby galaxies for unusually large amounts of this mid-infrared emission that might arise from alien civilizations. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

Hi everyone,

Long time reader, rarely posting; I couldn't even remember my old account info!

Not sure if this is the primary thread for KIC 8462852 aka WTF 001 aka 'Tabby's Star', however the title is appropriate, so I decided to update this one.

I'm one of the many thousands of participants over on PlanetHunters.org. I wasn't involved in discovering KIC 8462852, but I've been participating for several years and have been following it closely and I wanted to alert the community here to something interesting going on. Well two things, really.

It's come to my attention that our science team has decided enough time has been wasted since Kepler's last reaction wheel failed, and we are going after this star again in an aggressive manner. Because it's impossible to secure regular time on the world's largest telescopes (i.e., Keck, VLT) in order for constant follow up, a private telescope network is being sought for a year's worth of observations--in this case the brand new LCOGT. A Kickstarter campaign just kicked off to help us accomplish that. If we succeed and are able to catch it dipping again, this time we'll get multi-color obs and be able to say something tangible about what is blocking the starlight. Even if the campaign fails, the network gifted PH project like 20 nights or something, so we still have a shot at catching another dip in the act.

Here is the link if any of you are interested in joining the effort:

www.kickstarter.com...

There is a briefing video at top that updates things from the TED talk given earlier this year.

I do NOT expect the community here to donate nor am I asking anyone to--just please spread the word if this mystery is of interest to you. I suspect I'm brushing the edge of the ATS ToS by even mentioning the KS effort. But this is important.

No large influential institution besides SETI is going to stick their neck out and donate telescope time to PH so we can solve this, and the SETI Institute doesn't have enough access to the large optical scope networks. I think it's great the public helped discover this object and ironically, will also likely be instrumental in helping solve the mystery.

The other piece of new is about that the side-debate over whether this F star has been gradually dimming in an overall fashion over the last 100 years. There is another paper out refuting the Schaefer claim, located here:

The Stability of F-star Brightness on Century Timescales
arxiv.org...

Basically they argue that the trend is linear in their study--no dimming. However, there is another plate stack in Europe that is being examined, so if a dimming trend is confirmed there (no Menzel Gap to argue about), then all bets are off. I don't wholly discount the original argument that there is some subjective expertise required to measure these plates 'properly' so a subtle trend could be going on with 8462852 despite the statistical refutation. Jury is still out on all of this, IMO...

a reply to: Exoplaneting

great!! I've been keeping this on my radar.. glad to see this update ..

a reply to: Krypto1

A new defense of the `century-long-dimming' of KIC 8462852 is now out from Brad Schaefer.

www.centauri-dreams.org...

Whether this is long term magnitude dimming is really happening or not, it's a distinctly different phenomenon than the aperiodic eclipses observed by Kepler over its 4 year mission. Those are definitely real and not artifacts or systematics.

Very weird....

a reply to: Exoplaneting

Thanks for that update!! I will read...this isn't going away...which is great!!

Michio Kaku and SETI

Michio Kaku – “There is a colossal, humongous, object of some sort blocking the starlight from this star.”
www.ufointernationalproject.com...

“This could be the biggest story in the past five-hundred years,” Michio Kaku explained.

“Basically if a planet eclipses a Mother Star, goes in front of the Mother Star, starlight drops maybe one percent at maximum–however starlight has been dropping at twenty-two percent,” Kaku explained.

“There is a colossal, humongous, object of some sort blocking the starlight from this star.”

“We’ve ruled out all of the usual suspects; rouge planets, comets, asteroids” and the only thing left is an ‘alien superstructure’ of some type.

“We’re talking about what’s called a Type Two Civilization that could build a gigantic [Dyson Sphere] sphere possibly bigger than Jupiter to absorb starlight, to produce energy and is right out of science fiction.”


SETI

The Mysterious Star KIC 8462852


www.seti.org...

The SETI Institute is following up on the possibility that the stellar system KIC 8462852 might be home to an advanced civilization.

This star, slightly brighter than the Sun and more than 1400 light-years away, has been the subject of scrutiny by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It has shown some surprising behavior that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light.

For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favored suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star.

But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star.

a reply to: 2012newstart

Or, it's a swarm of Monoliths.

If a monolith swarm can ignite Jupiter, then they can probably make a normal star go nova, or supernova. Even if it's not supposed to do that based on its age or mass.

Hi everyone,

Happy to report that our Kickstarter campaign has risen from the potential ashes and we are on track to make a BIG upset finish.

35 hours to go, and we are at an INCREDIBLE ~90% !!!

All the haters and naysayers that said we would never accomplish this feat, are about to eat some crow.

Please help us spread the word, obtaining LCOGT network observations of this object is CRITICAL to solving the mystery. If we make this happen, we WILL catch the next dip and be able to get some BIG telescopes pointed in the right direction!!!



www.kickstarter.com...

a reply to: Exoplaneting

Even if you get any telescope you'd like, what do you expect to see that isn't already being observed?

It's not like you can get an aperture large enough to resolve an orbiting structure. And given the current hooha over Tabby's, I'd imagine they're watching the light output somewhere or other already.

If they can observe a dip in the light output of Tabby's Star with professional equipment, the light can be analyzed via spectroscope. This should tell us if the material obscuring the star is dust, or gas, or something solid, and its chemical composition.

We would then have a much better idea of what is happening at this star. We would be well on our way to answering that fascinating question: Could we be seeing the work of an advanced civilization in space? And that, I judge, is worth being a part of, and well worth contributing to.

"Scientists Are Now Even More Confused By Potential "Alien Superstructure""

Not sure is this is truly new information, or simply one of those articles that sort of rephrases existing info, but there it is. Just happened to see that while browsing elsewhere and thought it might be of interest.

A new, unpublished study posted to arXiv, reports the results of studying images of the star from the Kepler Telescope over the past four years. The paper shows shocking results: the star's luminosity varied, sometimes dipping by 20% over the course of the study period. Even more perplexingly, its total luminosity, or flux, diminished by 4% overall over that time.

"The part that really surprised me was just how rapid and non-linear [the dimming] was," study author Ben Montet of Caltech told Gizmodo. "We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn't real. We just weren't able to."

It also goes on to mention the crowdfunding initiative mentioned earlier. At the bottom of the article is the source to the original article (the link to which I could not get to work on ATS) which is a bit longer, but otherwise appears the same.

Peace.