Kepler's 'Alien Megastructure' Star Just Got Weirder

originally posted by: Ophiuchus 13
Is it possible to use technologies found in transmission electron microscope, to build a similar device like a transmission electron telescope? That can see in real time.

As far as I understand it, it's a completely different thing, in a transmission electron microscope electrons travel through the target and what is seen is an image resulting from the effects of the electrons on the target.

To create a transmission electron telescope we would need to bombard the star with electrons and get a resulting image, and for that we would need (probably) a much better detection method than we have now for the light coming from the star.

Also, it wouldn't be in real time, if I'm not mistaken it would take twice as long, as we would have to wait for the electrons to reach the star and then wait for the result.

originally posted by: Puppylove
a reply to: Kandinsky

It may not be a Dyson Sphere under construction, but that doesn't rule out a super structure. Imagine if you will a type of "mother" ship that can move and is being expanded on. Perhaps even moving to compensate various sun based "weathers" to stay where energy is best acquired and avoid more hostile sun weather patterns.

They might also do it in such a way that it's not clearly evident what's happening to certain other types of observers but it's no easy task to build a Dyson Sphere on the sly..

Also, one couldn't make any assumptions on the nature of the relative positioning of the structure which could very easily be moved in it's orbit in unpredictable ways as it's being assembled particularly if they don't wish to blatantly publicize what they are doing.

The idea of the Dyson Sphere is in some circles intimately connected with the idea of self-replicating von Neumann probes which are self replicating mother ships who make use of that energy to shoot off in all different directions at sub-light speeds.

If we saw a laser firing out of the star, then we'd know for sure there was something up..

Of course you wouldn't pick your OWN star to make use of, but a nearby one or the whole process could also be automated as part of an intergalactic infrastructure project.

It would freak us out for sure if other stars starting doing the same thing.

or maybe something is happening to the star that we dont understand? why does it have to be aliens?

Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby’s star has looked at it,” he said. “It’s been looked at with Hubble, it’s been looked at with Keck, it’s been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found.”
...
While Siemion and his colleagues are skeptical that the star’s unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can’t not take a look. They’ve teamed up with UC Berkeley visiting astronomer Jason Wright and Tabetha Boyajian, the assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Louisiana State University for whom the star is named, to observe the star with state-of-the-art instruments the Breakthrough Listen team recently mounted on the 100-meter telescope. Wright is at the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Pennsylvania State University.

The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three nights over the next two months, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion, Wright and Boyajian are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to start the observations, and expect to gather around 1 petabyte of data over hundreds of millions of individual radio channels.

Nextbigfuture.com, Oct. 26, 2016 - Tabby Star, which has unusual dimming that is possible evidence of superadvanced aliens, will get extensive observation from 100 meter SETI radiotelescope.

So in a couple months we will get even more data on this peculiar star. Nice to see the star's namesake being involved.

Maybe a cool Christmas present this year!

a reply to: TEOTWAWKIAIFF

The results of their observations will not be known for more than a month, because of the data analysis required to pick out patterns in the radio emissions.

UCBerkeley.edu, news, Oct. 25, 2016 - Breakthrough Listen to search for intelligent life around weird star.

From the source (there is a little better information at UCB). So, two months to observe and another month to pour over the petabyte of data... that sounds about right! So it looks like the beginning of February before we will know the results.

I guess science takes time and I am cool with that!

Bradley Schaefer looked at old DASCH photometry and found that [Tabby's] Star has been fading over the past 100 years, a claim at least as extraordinary as the star’s Kepler light curve.

Ben Montet and Josh Simon very cleverly recently used the Kepler full-frame imagery—some calibration data that doesn’t get much attention because you can’t use it to find planets—to get accurate long-term photometry of [Tabby's] Star over the course of the mission. Amazingly (to everyone but Bradley, I suspect), they found that the star got 4% dimmer over 4 years, in a monotonic but irregular way. What’s more it is the only star out of > 200 that show this effect.

This independent confirmation of the unprecedented effect Schaefer claimed—even if not covering the same time period—shows that Shaefer’s analysis is correct and the star really has dimmed a lot. Adding the two effects, the star is now apparently at least 17% dimmer than it was in 1890.

We now have two inexplicable things going on: long-term, secular dimming of 17% in 115 years, and these days-long, deep “dips” of up to 22%. Both are very hard to explain.

Nextbigfuture.com, Nov. 3, 2016 - Possible reasons for the unusual dimming of Tabby's star include super-advanced aliens.

So even without the SETI/Berkeley observation there is independent confirmation that the star has dimmed. A different team, different instrument, same results... this is an interesting star!

So interesting...

According to Andrew Siemion, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, the center had recently entered into a partnership with FAST to join the Breakthrough Listen SETI project, South China Morning Post reports.

Nature World News, Nov. 2, 2016 - China’s Super-Telescope FAST Joins Hunt for Aliens on Tabby’s Star.

FAST will be listening for radio signals. So, a sight and sound recon on KIC 8462852. Very interesting indeed.


[ETA - The rest of the Nextbigfuture article lists 13 possible reasons for the observed dimming. Their conclusion: "unclear".]

The star KIC 8462852 shows a very unusual and hard to comprehend light curve. The dip d7922 absorbs 16% of the starlight. The light curve is unusually smooth but the very steep edges make it hard to find a simple natural explanation by covering due to comets or other well-known planetary objects. We describe a mathematical approximation to the light curve, which is motivated by a physically meaningful event of a large stellar beam which generates an orbiting cloud. The data might fit to the science fiction idea of star lifting, a mining technology that could extract star matter.

arxiv.org, unpublished, Nov 21, 2016 - A physically inspired model of Dip d792 and d1519 of the Kepler light curve seen at KIC8462852 (pdf).

Found this! Instead of just measuring the thoughts have strayed into "science fiction"! The above is from their own abstract on their paper. "Mining the star" of what?? It would seem self defeating to drain your star of energy. Even trying to think what could absorb the sun's output... ah, that is too much! Still not sure how that would work.

Soul cooking and star lifting. Not bad times we live in but interesting!

Anybody hear of "star lifting" before? I have not.

Star lifting is any of several hypothetical processes by which a sufficiently advanced civilization (specifically, one of Kardashev-II or higher) could remove a substantial portion of a star matter for any number of purposes. The term appears to have been coined by David Criswell.

Wikipedia

Could it be a Dyson sphere?

I don't know what it is, but I'll tell you what, based on reading some of these comments the first mistake I see people make are assumptions. In other words, you're using human paradigms and frame of reference to try and explain why it would be useless to build some massive superstructure.

Keep in mind, we don't know why an alien intelligence would build a "dyson sphere", for all we know it could be some tier 2 or 3 civilization working on a massive science project.

Of course it could just be something else.

Possible answer!

In its search for extrasolar planets, the Kepler space telescope looks for stars whose light flux periodically dims, signaling the passing of an orbiting planet in front of the star. But the timing and duration of diminished light flux episodes Kepler detected coming from KIC 846852, known as Tabby's star, are a mystery. These dimming events vary in magnitude and don't occur at regular intervals, making an orbiting planet an unlikely explanation.

The Illinois team [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] applied a statistical analysis to the light curve's smaller irregular variations. What they found is a mathematical pattern consistent with a well-established avalanche model: the smaller dimming events are the "crackling noise" or small avalanches that are observed during the time intervals between the larger avalanches, equated to the larger dimming events. The small dimming events come in a remarkably broad range of sizes, which are distributed according to a simple scaling law. These results suggest the dimming events may be intrinsic to Tabby's star and that the star may be near the critical point of an underlying continuous phase transition.
…

"Basically, we are looking at the statistical distributions of the fluctuations. All of these things have power laws associated with them. This gives us an independent way to interpret the events and check consistency with the model."

Power laws have the interesting feature that they look the same on different scales. So when you zoom in to small scales and short times you get the same types of statistical distributions as when you zoom out to larger scales and longer times. Power laws reflect self-similarity of the system over a wide range of length and time scales -- similar to fractals…
…

If the dimming events are associated with an oncoming phase transition, what would the star be transitioning toward and in what time frame? Weaver explains, "As more data is being analyzed we hope it will be possible to identify exactly what type of transition this is. We don't have a deep enough understanding to get a definitive answer, and more observations are required. We can only speculate on what such a transition would be."

ScienceDaily.com, Dec. 20, 2016 - Avalanche statistics suggest Tabby's star is near a continuous phase transition.

So there you have it. No Dyson sphere/swarm explanation necessary. Although it is interesting they do not know what KIC 846852 is transitioning to it is in a phase transition.

All thanks to power laws and avalanche statistics! Gotta love the maths!

Maybe when they look at the data they gathered with observations over the last few months they can get a better idea what is happening.

originally posted by: TEOTWAWKIAIFF
Possible answer!

In its search for extrasolar planets, the Kepler space telescope looks for stars whose light flux periodically dims, signaling the passing of an orbiting planet in front of the star. But the timing and duration of diminished light flux episodes Kepler detected coming from KIC 846852, known as Tabby's star, are a mystery. These dimming events vary in magnitude and don't occur at regular intervals, making an orbiting planet an unlikely explanation.

The Illinois team [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] applied a statistical analysis to the light curve's smaller irregular variations. What they found is a mathematical pattern consistent with a well-established avalanche model: the smaller dimming events are the "crackling noise" or small avalanches that are observed during the time intervals between the larger avalanches, equated to the larger dimming events. The small dimming events come in a remarkably broad range of sizes, which are distributed according to a simple scaling law. These results suggest the dimming events may be intrinsic to Tabby's star and that the star may be near the critical point of an underlying continuous phase transition.
…

"Basically, we are looking at the statistical distributions of the fluctuations. All of these things have power laws associated with them. This gives us an independent way to interpret the events and check consistency with the model."

Power laws have the interesting feature that they look the same on different scales. So when you zoom in to small scales and short times you get the same types of statistical distributions as when you zoom out to larger scales and longer times. Power laws reflect self-similarity of the system over a wide range of length and time scales -- similar to fractals…
…

If the dimming events are associated with an oncoming phase transition, what would the star be transitioning toward and in what time frame? Weaver explains, "As more data is being analyzed we hope it will be possible to identify exactly what type of transition this is. We don't have a deep enough understanding to get a definitive answer, and more observations are required. We can only speculate on what such a transition would be."

ScienceDaily.com, Dec. 20, 2016 - Avalanche statistics suggest Tabby's star is near a continuous phase transition.

So there you have it. No Dyson sphere/swarm explanation necessary. Although it is interesting they do not know what KIC 846852 is transitioning to it is in a phase transition.

All thanks to power laws and avalanche statistics! Gotta love the maths!

Maybe when they look at the data they gathered with observations over the last few months they can get a better idea what is happening.

Fascinating! Thank you for the update; I have to say that some kind of as-yet-unknown phase of star death / fluctuation has always been my take on this matter, although evidence of some kind of ET would of course have been more exciting ;-)

Do we have a date for the publication of the FAST results?

a reply to: GovernmentSauce

Exactly the same sentiment; some kind of heart pains, burps, wind and 'not feeling right' at star level of existence.
4K years ago...

So, in a Schrödinger's kinda paradigim thing,
does this mean that this ''recently' discovered phenomenon
goes neutron, next tuesday !?!

Jeeebus, we could be just 4 light years from oblivion

originally posted by: Wolfenz

originally posted by: dragonridr

originally posted by: SouthernForkway26
How much physical material would it take to dim a star that much? Is there even enough matter and mass in Earth to do that, if we were to try that with our sun? Also wouldn't 'choice' materials be used in a mega-structure? Entire planets would have to be destroyed to mine material for a days on sphere. The ecological impact on a solar system scale is really hard to grasp.

My WAG is that maybe it is artificial, but it would be a device that can 'suck' in energy and light in like a vacuum, somehow using gravity to bend the light to a source with different settings to capture the energy as they demand it. It could be a 'gas station' for interstellar travelers...

To build a dysons sphere around our sun would require the matter from several local star systems. If you had the ability to make it you wouldn't need to make it, It really isn't a practical idea. It litterally takes more energy to build than your star would give you. The only way I see this as practical would be a dying galaxy. And life tried to hang on around a few remainIng star system. But even than if you could move the mass of entire solar systems you could build your own star so not even sure it's ptactical than either.

Ok Let Me grasp on this ...

Why in the Galaxy ... would Extra Terrestrials Build a Dyson Sphere ??

Taking from other Star Systems Planets , Brown Dwarfs Comets Etc.. Resources,

As They can Easily Terra Form ... a near Star System Planet in the Goldie Locks Zone of the Conditioning the ET's Habitat

right Make Sense...


What Other Purpose of a DYSON "SPHERE" ???

If I had to Guess .. it would be the Opposite of what your thinking right Now..

Creating a Dyson Sphere ,, Containing a Dying Star , Smothering it Out .. Perhaps

to Prevent it going Super Nova ??? ( exploding // imploding ).. reducing Damage ..

Protecting & Shielding .... other Nearby Stars that contain Life! as in the Aliens True Home land ..

Just a Plausible Guess..

well makes Sense of Team Work form other ET's Working together from other Star Systems...

well thats if you are thinking of the Dyson Sphere Theory..

Funny.. of the Star systems around this Galaxy this one in particular is going some strange Stuff ..

that has got Scientist Attention ... possible black hole nearby ??

Well just Maybe some other Aliens ETS

with the same Intelligence as we have ( CIV Type 0 ) looking at the cosmos same as Us Earthen's
are scratching their head too about this Star System in Question !

I guess we have wait , and get the actual Solved Mystery in 1,400 years time of what is going on ..
with this Star!!


but here is the Problem we dont understand

with our own Star aka SUN

just about everything that go near the Sun that has been viewed ( SOHO )

EITHER !

gets Pulled into the SUN Destroying it or Broken Up

or The Sun Whips the intruder Object (( Comets meteors exoplanets Etc... )
out of its Orbit like the Star/SUN is Alive ! as like it senses the Object!!

Why did the ancients races of earth build huge megalithic structures? because they could.

originally posted by: Damiel
a reply to: GovernmentSauce

Exactly the same sentiment; some kind of heart pains, burps, wind and 'not feeling right' at star level of existence.
4K years ago...

So, in a Schrödinger's kinda paradigim thing,
does this mean that this ''recently' discovered phenomenon
goes neutron, next tuesday !?!

Jeeebus, we could be just 4 light years from oblivion

Ha! Yes! A rather convoluted, but noticeable form of looking paler than usual :-) 100 years for a star really is a blink of an eye.

Much like the whole Betelgeuse sitution too - surely that red giant died thousands of years ago, but we're still watching it, waiting to see it happen...

a reply to: zetaReticulous
Because they did not have TV, internets, phones. They were
bored.

info:

Sunspot
Sunspots are temporary phenomena on the photosphere of the Sun that appear visibly as dark spots compared to surrounding regions. They correspond to concentrations of magnetic field flux that inhibit convection and result in reduced surface temperature compared to the surrounding photosphere. Sunspots usually appear in pairs…(also on pears**)
Wikipedia


normally our Sun's sunspots fade away as the magnetic storms re-absorb into the lower altitudes of the Suns' layers of atmosphere

the far away object may be an enlarging Sun, which keep adding new, longer duration sunspots even as new surface area is visible... Is this Star evolving into a magnet Star instead of being enclosed in an exotic creation like an imaginative dyson-sphere

our close by, near-by Star objects are average or known types of stars... this distant object may be not-so-usual or average...it could be an anomaly at the strangest but not automatically an object encased in a large energy collection structure by some physical Alien culture







(**pears) - cracked a funny tyvm

a reply to: asen_y2k

sounds like a generator, some energy being took out it, possibly?

A team of more than 200 researchers, including Penn State Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Assistant Professor Jason Wright and led by Louisiana State University's Tabetha Boyajian, is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the "most mysterious star in the universe." KIC 8462852, or "Tabby's Star," nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an ordinary star, about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun, and about than 1,000 light years away. However, it has been inexplicably dimming and brightening sporadically like no other. Several theories abound to explain the star's unusual light patterns, including that an alien megastructure is orbiting the star.

...
"We were hoping that once we finally caught a dip happening in real time we could see if the dips were the same depth at all wavelengths. If they were nearly the same, this would suggest that the cause was something opaque, like an orbiting disk, planet, or star, or even large structures in space" said Wright, who is a co-author of the paper, titled "The First Post-Kepler Brightness Dips of KIC 8462852." Instead, the team found that the star got much dimmer at some wavelengths than at others.

"Dust is most likely the reason why the star's light appears to dim and brighten. The new data shows that different colors of light are being blocked at different intensities. Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure," Boyajian said.

phys.org, Jan. 3, 2018 - Alien megastructure not the cause of dimming of the 'most mysterious star in the universe'

Alien megastructure is out!

Bummer. That would have been a cool thing to see... like the Death Star under construction! Ah well. More prosaic explanation like space dust bunnies herding by.

It is still a mystery as to what is happening which is cool!

yeah, debunked, cya