Posted on 10/05/2016 5:46:51 PM PDT by BenLurkin
The more scientists learn about "Tabby's Star," the more mysterious the bizarre object gets.
Newly analyzed observations by NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope show that the star KIC 8462852 — whose occasional, dramatic dips in brightness still have astronomers scratching their heads — has also dimmed overall during the last few years.
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KIC 8462852 hit the headlines last September, when a team of astronomers led by Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University announced that the star had dimmed dramatically several times over the past few years — in one case, by a whopping 22 percent.
These brightness dips are too significant to be caused by an orbiting planet, so scientists began suggesting alternative explanations. Perhaps a planet or a family of orbiting comets broke up, for example, and the ensuing cloud of dust and fragments periodically blocks the star's light. Or maybe some unknown object in the depths of space between the star and Earth is causing the dimming.
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The weirdness increased in January 2016, when astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University reported that KIC 8462852 also seems to have dimmed overall by 14 percent between 1890 and 1989.
This conclusion is based on Schaefer's analysis of photographic plates of the night sky that managed to capture Tabby's Star, which lies about 1,500 light-years from Earth. Some other astronomers questioned this interpretation, however, suggesting that differences in the instruments used to photograph the sky over that time span may be responsible for the apparent long-term dimming.
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"This star was already completely unique because of its sporadic dimming episodes," Simon said in the same statement. "But now we see that it has other features that are just as strange, both slowly dimming for almost three years and then suddenly getting fainter much more rapidly."
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Until they can see things in real time its all bull chit and ancient history
O’s runners back on his home planet ....signalling him what sabotage to do to us next
Unknown object? Jaaaa!!!!
A Von Braun HOLE ..
The Galactica having lighting problems?
So you're basically anti-telescope?
Long long ago and far far away
Probably just C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I get nothing on Bing.
WTF is a Von Braun Hole ?
That headline makes it seem like it’s about a TV show called “Alien Megastructure”, and its star’s behavior “keeps getting stranger”, which would not be an uncommon story in Hollywood.
Real time? You can’t even see the moon in real time.
It’s a bad connection.
It doesn’t exist, you can’t see it, its so much vapour.and then puuffffftttt.. Where’d it go? :-)
It's the naughty place where all the bad stuff comes out.
My guess
It’s somewhat like a Green Energy Burn Day. No big deal.
This star would normally be dim except for some nearby fire stoking going on.
One of the planets in Tabby’s orbit occasionally burns it’s trash, prisoners, terrorists, TV commentators and corrupt politicians using One way garbage space trucks.
Something we should consider here.
Everyone hates landfills.
Until they can see things in real time its all bull chit and ancient history
So you’re basically anti-telescope?
And anti speed of light...
Nothing has ever been seen in 'real time'.
1) Photons bounce off or are transmitted through an object.
2) They travel through space and impinge on an eye. This takes time. For example the light we see coming from the Sun left it about 8 minutes before we see it.
3) It takes some amount of time for the effects of the photons impinging on our eyes for our minds to turn that into a recognizable image. So even if the object was right up against the eye, it would still take some time for us to recognize the object. That time might be in the milliseconds or nanoseconds, but that's a huge amount of time depending on one's perspective, e.g. the lifetime of some radioactive particles, the number of calculations performed by a supercomputer, etc.
So everything we experience happened in the past. Saying that an observation that happened a few seconds ago is a different kind of observation than one that happened a hundred years ago is a mistake.
We may often find that relatively recent observations are more trustworthy than those in the distant past, but this is not always the case.
There are magicians, optical illusions, etc. that can lead us to incorrect conclusions even though they are happening right before our eyes. Conversely, we all know that Abraham Lincoln was the U. S. President when we entered the Civil War even though it happened over a hundred years ago.
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