'Alien Megastructure' Ruled Out for Star's Weird Dimming

There's a prosaic explanation for at least some of the weirdness of "Tabby's star," it would appear. The bizarre long-term dimming of Tabby's star — also known as

By Mike Wall Space.com 10-4-17

Boyajian's star, or, more formally, KIC 8462852 — is likely caused by dust, not a giant network of solar panels or any other "megastructure" built by advanced aliens, a new study suggests.

Astronomers came to this conclusion after noticing that this dimming was more pronounced in ultraviolet (UV) than infrared light. Any object bigger than a dust grain would cause uniform dimming across all wavelengths, study team members said.

[...]

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Alien Megastructure Mystery Will Be Settled For Good

The faraway star KIC 8462852 has been a fervent topic of debate over the last few months, ever since folks at SETI proposed that maybe—just maybe—a there was a giant alien megastructure around the star responsible for the weird readings scientists had been getting. Since then, most people have come to accept the more ordinary explanation that comets are responsible for the space oddity. But it turns out the NASA's next great observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, could be just the thing to answer this kind of question for sure.

By John Wenz www.popularmechanics.com 2-9-16

The hubbub all started last October when NASA's Kepler planet-hunting telescope found a strange phenomenon around a sun-like star. Something was blocking out 20 percent of the light from KIC 8462852, since nicknamed "Tabby's Star" after discoverer Tabetha S. Boyajian. A planet even the size of Jupiter or larger should have blocked out only 1 percent of the light. That suggests something big is here, and no Earth-based telescopes detected heat coming from whatever was blocking the light, meaning it wasn't a planet or an asteroid.

The lead hypothesis has been, and remains, that comets are blocking out the light. A swarm of them may have collided and created a giant cloud of icy-cold debris. But even that doesn't quite tell the whole story. For one thing, astronomers still can't explain how there would be a cloud of comets big enough to block out that much light from a mid-sized star. It would require more mass than is found in our solar system's entire Kuiper Belt, the region of objects that includes Pluto, an unlikely scenario.

That's where the megastructures came in [...]

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Comets Can’t Explain Weird ‘Alien Megastructure’ Star

By www.newscientist.com
1-15-16

      The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, it might be aliens.

Known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star, it has been baffling astronomers for the past few months after a team of researchers noticed its light seemed to be dipping in brightness in bizarre ways. Proposed explanations ranged from a cloud of comets to orbiting “alien megastructures”.

Now an analysis of historical observations reveals the star has been gradually dimming for over a century, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the cause.


The first signs of this space oddity came from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which continually watched the star’s region of the sky between 2009 and 2013. Most planet-hosting stars show small, regular dips in light when their planets pass in front of them. But Tabby’s star dipped erratically throughout the four years, sometimes losing as much as 20 per cent of its brightness. [...]

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A diagram of a Dyson sphere as one might be constructed in our solar system

By Elizabeth Howell
Space.com
10-28-15

      A star is dimming for reasons that astronomers can't explain.

Observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope revealed that the star KIC 8462852, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, dimmed dramatically and strangely several times over the past few years. Researchers aren't sure what's going on, and they have posited that some sort of light-blocking "alien megastructure" is a possible — though unlikely — explanation.

Astronomers are following up on that possibility, using radio telescopes to hunt for signals coming from KIC 8462852. But these scientists are urging skepticism on the alien-life hypothesis — as are science-fiction writers.

A star is dimming for reasons that astronomers can't explain.

Observations by NASA's Kepler space telescope revealed that the star KIC 8462852, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth, dimmed dramatically and strangely several times over the past few years. Researchers aren't sure what's going on, and they have posited that some sort of light-blocking "alien megastructure" is a possible — though unlikely — explanation.

Astronomers are following up on that possibility, using radio telescopes to hunt for signals coming from KIC 8462852. But these scientists are urging skepticism on the alien-life hypothesis — as are science-fiction writers. [...]

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Mysterious Star and Aliens Were Hot Topic on Late Show with Stephen Colbert

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By www.ew.com
10-30-15

      Somewhere out there, aliens could be watching us. At least that’s what Stephen Colbert tried to prove on Thursday night’s episode of The Late Show.

The host was joined by Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey host Neil deGrasse Tyson and producer Seth MacFarlane to discuss the recent buzz about a potential ‘Alien Megastructure’ in space.

The three discussed how the Kepler telescope observed star KIC 8462852 which is dimming by a large percentage, signaling that it could potentially mean alien life.

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'Alien Megastructure' Mystery May Soon Be Solved

Artist's illustration of NASA's Kepler space telescope, which observed that the star KIC 8462852 dimmed dramatically numerous times between 2009 and 2013.

By Mike Wall
Space.com
10-28-15

      The mystery behind a strangely dimming star could soon be solved.

Astronomers around the world are keeping a close eye on the star KIC 8462852, which has dimmed dramatically numerous times over the past few years, dropping in brightness by up to 22 percent. These big dips have spurred speculation that the star may be surrounded by some type of alien megastructure — a hypothesis that will be put to the test if and when KIC 8462852 dims again.

"As long as one of those events occurs again, we should be able to catch it in the act, and then we'll definitely be able to figure out what we're seeing," said Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University. [...]

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The Mysterious Star KIC 8462852

By Seth Shostak
www.seti.org
10-27-15

      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.

To investigate this idea, we have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-natural radio signals from the direction of KIC 8462852. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals (similar to traditional SETI experiments) as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft. [...]

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By Sarah Kaplan
The Washington Post
10-17-15

     It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data," said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. "We were scratching our heads. For any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it."

She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn't sure what.

[...]

To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. If none of the ordinary reasons for the star's flux quite seemed to fit, perhaps an extraordinary one was in order.

Aliens.

Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens - a "swarm of megastructures," as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star.

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

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The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy

By Ross Andersen
The Atlantic
10-13-15

Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.

      [...]

“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.”

[...]

“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. [...]

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Star’s Strange Behavior – Sign of Alien Life?

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By Fox News
10-15-15

      A distant star is getting a lot of attention from astronomers – possibly as a sign that alien life is out there.

The star KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program at Yale University. Taking data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers go searching for signs of a drop in light due to orbiting exoplanets crossing in front of their parent stars.

KIC 8462852 is 1,481 light years away from Earth. A light year measures the astronomical distance that light travels in one year and is equivalent to 5.8 trillion miles. Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who wrote a paper on the star that appeared in the Monthly Notes of the Royals Astronomical Society, told the New Scientist that she was drawn to the star’s flickering behavior.

She then sent her data to Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright, who has done research on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He was impressed.

“That was when I got interested in in it because the light curve is so bizarre,” Wright told FoxNews.com. “It gets dimmer for days at a time. We haven’t seen anything quite like this.” [...]

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