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Re: Star continues to baffle scientists
I could've swore I posted a thread about this star last year when this news surfaced. Cant find it. Maybe it got lost during that glitch late last year.
Since the 1960s, scientists have been looking for something known as a "Dyson Sphere". A theoretical Dyson Sphere is what an advanced alien race and humanity in the future would use to harness the energy of their own star. Within centuries we will likely have one around the Sun. Astronomers have been looking for decades without ANY hope of finding one.......until now. There are anomalies going on here and scientists are doing everything in their power to explain it away as something natural.....but none of it is adding up. Yesterday the plot got a lot thicker and whatever is going on here is getting stranger.
As you know in our debates of old, I have major doubts on there being super advanced aliens out there. Life requires so many quirks of fate, accidents, extinction events, luck, etc. to get even to the level of dinosaurs. While I do believe there's life throughout the universe and even in our own solar system(we'll find life on some of Saturn and Jupiter's moons), ET hopping from galaxy to galaxy never sounded realistic to me. Another reason I started to doubt advanced aliens is what's known as the Singularity......we will eventually reach that point and there are no signs out there anyone else has yet.
I'm starting to think this star does have a Dyson Sphere which would not only prove life does exist somewhere besides earth, but that there's at least one alien race that is a few centuries ahead of us in technology.
For those here who don't pay much attention to astronomy news, this is NOT horse shit from conspiracy sites. This odd star and whatever is going on there is really happening.
Anyways, here's the latest news on this star......
Triple signal of ‘alien megastructure’ star baffles astronomers
The mystery of the so-called “alien megastructure” star just deepened.
KIC 8462852, as it is more properly known, flickers so erratically that one astronomer has speculated that nothing other than a massive extraterrestrial construction project could explain its weird behaviour. A further look showed it has been fading for a century. Now, fresh analysis suggests the star has also dimmed more rapidly over the past four years – only adding to the enigma.
“It seems that every time someone looks at the star, it gets weirder and weirder,” says Benjamin Montet at the California Institute of Technology, who led the study.
This space oddity was first spotted by NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which continually monitored 100,000 stars from 2009 to 2013. Any dip observed in a star’s light is a sign that an exoplanet has passed in front of it. These dips, which occur regularly, block at most 1 per cent of the star’s light and have revealed thousands of exoplanets.
But KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s star after its discoverer Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University, was an outlier. Its light dipped by as much as 20 per cent and didn’t conform to any regular time intervals – so the signature couldn’t have been caused by a planet.
Astronomers came up with an array of potential explanations, from the mundane to the bizarre. The star made headlines when Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University, announced that an advanced extraterrestrial civilization could be responsible for the signal.
But the plot thickened when Bradley Schaefer, at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, probed the star’s behaviour over the past century by looking at old photographic plates from 1890 to 1989. More than 1200 images revealed that Tabby’s star gradually dimmed by as much as 15 per cent over the course of a century.
Schaefer’s work was immediately called into question. However, with so few astronomers who have an expertise in these plates, no one seemed able to settle the debate. That is until Montet and his advisor Josh Simon realised that an answer might be hidden within the Kepler data.
They found that for the first 1000 days of the Kepler mission, Tabby’s star decreased in brightness at roughly 0.34 per cent a year – twice as fast as measured by Schaefer. What’s more, over the next 200 days, the star’s brightness dropped another 2.5 per cent before beginning to level out. It was a much more rapid change than before.
That means the star undergoes three types of dimming: the deep dips that first made it famous, the relatively slow decline observed by Schaefer and verified by Montet and Simon, and the intermediate rapid decline that occurred over a few hundred days.
“We can come up with scenarios that explain one or maybe two of these, but there’s nothing that nicely explains all three,” says Montet.
And the team doesn’t want to resort to creating three separate scenarios. “It would be much more satisfying to think of a single physical cause that could be responsible for all of the brightness variations that we observe,” says Simon. “But we’re still struggling to come up with what that might be.”
And Wright couldn’t be more thrilled. “I was always worried that the mystery would be solved with some really mundane explanation, like some overlooked instrumental effect, and that it would turn out to be a wild goose chase,” he says.
Explanations range from a swarm of comets orbiting the star to an intervening cloud in the interstellar medium – but none fit all the data.
What about that advanced alien megastructure? “Once you’re invoking arbitrary advanced aliens doing something with technology far beyond ours, then there isn’t very much that can’t be explained,” says Simon. “But we don’t really want to resort to that until we exhaust all of the possible natural explanations we can think of.”
Even Wright, the astronomer who postulated the alien megastructure in the first place, admits that it’s a last resort.
In the meantime, astronomers will continue to monitor the star. A successful crowdfunding campaign earlier this year raised over $100,000, allowing astronomers to secure time at the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, where they can observe the star for a year.
The hope is that Tabby’s star will soon drastically dim and they will be able to swing different ground-based and space-based observatories towards it. Catching a transit in as many wavelengths as possible should help pin down what is interfering with the star – be it a swarm of comets, an alien megastructure, or something else entirely.
Re: Star continues to baffle scientists
To hell with crowdfunding. I want the US and Russia to put millions into constantly observing this star for years.
I googled Dyson to see if he's still alive so he can witness this. He is but he's 92. Get him involved in the research even if its just as an honororary member of the team.
I wish Sagan and Einstein were still alive.
Re: Star continues to baffle scientists
As a long time dedicated follower of these things as well as alien visitation of planet Earth, this is interesting. However, every "weird" observation in the Universe up until now have all been explained by natural events. This one, still, Dodges that bullet, but like the guy says, it's a last possible solution to say it's a dyson sphere. I have to say I thought the mystery would have been explained by now, so good stuff, I like a mystery.
As for advanced alien civilizations. As the universe is infite, there's also an infinate number of paths life can take - which means the possibility of advanced alien life is shockingly high. If this is it, I don't know, but it should be closely followed.
Recently, the most interesting part of more terrestrial tales is the Stardust Ranch in Arizona. The interview of the owner of that place tells a story which is just bizarre. Either he's full of shit or he's right. Both solutions are almost as interesting - if you're into both psychology and UFOs.
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