Science Latest News on Tabby's Star (Megastructure)

Debi

Owner/Admin
Staff
Joined
Sep 16, 2013
Messages
240,716
Reaction score
232,062
Points
315
Location
South of Indy
Latest News on Tabby's Star, Is it Just Comets? - Art Bell

Latest News on Tabby’s Star, Is it Just Comets?
POSTED ON NOVEMBER 25, 2015 IN SCIENCE | 73 VIEWS | LEAVE A RESPONSE
In the latest report on Tabby’s Star, that is, KIC 8462852, astronomers from the University of Iowa claim to have a new idea about what could be causing the star’s dimming events.

Their answer? Comets. According to the Iowa State University website:
Massimo Marengo, an Iowa State University associate professor of physics and astronomy, wondered when he saw all the buzz about the mysterious star found by citizen scientists on the Planet Hunters website.


Irregular dips in brightness of up to 22 percent seemed uncharacteristic of anything astrophysicists have yet observed.

They continue,

Questions about the star were launched last month when a research team led by Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University reported on the star in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The astronomers reported how citizen scientists tagged the star’s deep and irregular dips in brightness as “bizarre” and “interesting.”
So Marengo and two other astronomers decided to take a close look at the star using data taken with the Infrared Array Camera of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. They report their findings in a paper recently published online by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Marengo said the study looked at two different infrared wavelengths: the shorter was consistent with a typical star and the longer showed some infrared emissions, but not enough to reach a detection threshold. The astronomers concluded there were no excess infrared emissions and therefore no sign of an asteroid belt collision, a giant impact on a planet or a dusty cloud of rock and debris.
So Marengo and his colleagues say the destruction of a family of comets near the star is the most likely explanation for the mysterious dimming. The comet fragments coming in rapidly at a steep, elliptical orbit could create a big debris cloud that could dim the star. Then the cloud would move off, restoring the star’s brightness and leaving no trace of excess infrared light.
And the alien megastructure theory?
“We didn’t look for that,” Marengo said. “We can’t really say it is, or is not. But what the star is doing is very strange. It’s interesting when you have phenomena like that — typically it means there’s some new physical explanation or a new concept to be discovered.”


What do you think? Are we seeing alien comets pass by the star, an alien megastructure, or something else?

Read more about their hypothesis: Iowa State University
 
  • Like
Reactions: Mokey
Well I have to of course hope it's alien in nature. It would be nice to have science back up my thoughts. ;)