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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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KIC 8462852 probably sounds like a string of random letters and numbers to you but I'm willing to bet if you've watched this channel long enough, you've heard it before. It's the name of a star, also

By Seeker 8-1-17

known as Tabby's Star, and it set the internet ablaze a couple years back when it dimmed in ways nobody could really explain, unless you pinned it on aliens building massive structures to power their civilization.

However, since then we haven't seen the star's light fade, and so public interest in it did. But in April of 2017, light levels started dropping again, giving astronomers new clues to come up with new ideas. Are any more compelling than a giant energy-harvesting megastructure built by aliens? I'll let you be the judge of that.
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The most mysterious star in the Milky Way is at it again. Astronomers are sounding the alarms Friday as telescope observations detect unusual light patterns coming from a distant star

By Marina Koren The Atlantic 5-19-17

located about 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus, in the outer edges of the galaxy. The mysterious dimming and flickering of the star, first discovered in 2011, means something is passing in front of it. It has puzzled astronomers ever since, but this is the first time they’ve seen it dimming in real time, presenting an extraordinary opportunity to observe whatever it is that’s blocking the star’s light.
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A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an "alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers. Over the past year, scientists have hypothesized that everything from a mass of comets to bad data or alien structures could be to blame for the unusual light curve. (Illustration)

A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an "alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers. A study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal has only

By Mary Bowerman USA Today 10-5-16

“deepened the mystery” surrounding the strange light pattern emitted from the star known as KIC 8462852.

...the strange dimming of KIC 8462852 suggests a large mass of matter is circling KIC 8462852. Over the past year, scientists have hypothesized that everything from a mass of comets to bad data or alien structures could be to blame for the unusual light curve. So far, nothing has been conclusive and attempts to identify radio signals from the star have been unfruitful. ...
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Within our own galaxy, some astronomers believe there may be a massive piece of alien technology, built to harvest energy from a distant star. The star, KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's Star, exhibits strange behavior, flickering and dimming,

By Sophie Weiner www.popularmechanics.com 8-6-16

that can't be explained by any known astronomical phenomena. A new, unpublished study posted to arXiv, reports the results of studying images of the star from the Kepler Telescope over the past four years. The paper shows shocking results: the star's luminosity varied, sometimes dipping by 20% over the course of the study period. Even more perplexingly, its total luminosity, or flux, diminished by 4% overall over that time.

"The part that really surprised me was just how rapid and non-linear [the dimming] was," study author Ben Montet of Caltech told Gizmodo. "We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn't real. We just weren't able to."
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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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      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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      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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     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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