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Posted on 10/15/2015 12:04:31 PM PDT by grundle
“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.
Boyajian wrote up a paper on possible explanations for the star’s bizarre behavior, and it was published recently in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. But she also sent her data to fellow astronomer Jason Wright, a Penn State University researcher who helped developed a protocol for seeking signs of unearthly civilization, wondering what he would make of it.
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.”
To be sure, both Boyajian and Wright believe the possibility of alien megastructures around KIC 8462852 is very, very remote. It’s worthy of hypothesis, Wright told Slate, “but we should also approach it skeptically.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
That is exactly what I was thinking - Shadow Squares would fit this perfectly. However, those were inside the Ringworld, now that I think about it. Wouldn't we see the Ring and not the Squares, thus the star would be at a constant brightness?
New Jerrsalem
I'm certain that whatever the reality is here, it's just as amazing as Larry Niven's imagination.
The only reason I thought of it was because, just the night before, I had watched an episode of “How The Universe Works” called “The Secret History of the Moon”, where they postulated that the Moon had a TWIN, born at the same time, that was smaller, made up of the same materials as the Earth, from the collision with another body that coalesced from the debris.
Being in the same orbit, the smaller Twin eventually crashed into the larger body, and merged with it on the backside from Earth, the part we never see. This would explain why the Moon’s crust is 30 miles thicker on the rear than the front.
This scenario would explain why the star in question would dim at different rates and intensities. The debris field is thicker in spots that are orbiting at different speeds..............
Looked this star up.... Besides the designation KIC 8462852, it is unofficially named “Tabby”. So you hit the nail on the head
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