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Alien hunters are fixated on a mysterious star, which refuses to reveal its secrets
Alien hunters are fixated on a mysterious star, which refuses to reveal its secrets
Twinkle, twinkle... (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
WRITTEN BY Akshat Rathi
A mysterious star has attracted global attention since its strange properties came to light in October last year. The star showed an odd pattern of dimming that could not be explained by any known natural phenomenon. Among the hypotheses that has yet to be disproved: the star is surrounded by an alien megastructure.
Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the famous astronomer Carl Sagan put it. Ever since Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University found KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star (named after her), professional scientists and amateur astronomers have been pointing their telescopes towards a small part of the night sky to collect more data.
A flurry of studies published over the past year show that the more data scientists collect, the stranger the star’s tale becomes. Every attempt to rule out the alien-megastructure hypothesis is met with more data that stops it from being discarded.
The sign that started it all
NASA launched the Kepler mission in 2009. Its aim was to search for planets by fixing its gaze at a tiny patch in the sky. When it spots a star’s light suddenly dim, it means that a planet has crossed between the star and the satellite. The amount of dimming is related to how big the planet is.
This is monotonous work. NASA created software to interpret the dimming—planets orbiting a star dim the light at regular intervals, so the agency’s software flagged these episodes to scientists to confirm the readings. A contingent at Yale, meanwhile...
Twinkle, twinkle... (NASA/JPL-Caltech)
WRITTEN BY Akshat Rathi
A mysterious star has attracted global attention since its strange properties came to light in October last year. The star showed an odd pattern of dimming that could not be explained by any known natural phenomenon. Among the hypotheses that has yet to be disproved: the star is surrounded by an alien megastructure.
Such extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as the famous astronomer Carl Sagan put it. Ever since Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University found KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star (named after her), professional scientists and amateur astronomers have been pointing their telescopes towards a small part of the night sky to collect more data.
A flurry of studies published over the past year show that the more data scientists collect, the stranger the star’s tale becomes. Every attempt to rule out the alien-megastructure hypothesis is met with more data that stops it from being discarded.
The sign that started it all
NASA launched the Kepler mission in 2009. Its aim was to search for planets by fixing its gaze at a tiny patch in the sky. When it spots a star’s light suddenly dim, it means that a planet has crossed between the star and the satellite. The amount of dimming is related to how big the planet is.
This is monotonous work. NASA created software to interpret the dimming—planets orbiting a star dim the light at regular intervals, so the agency’s software flagged these episodes to scientists to confirm the readings. A contingent at Yale, meanwhile...
More at http://qz.com/752783/alien-hunters-are-fixated-on-a-mysterious-star-which-refuses-to-reveal-its-secrets/
12 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Discovered by citizen scientists scouring data publicly available through the crowdsourced Planet Hunters effort, these dimming events kicked off a years-long effort by a team led by Tabetha Boyajian at Yale to figure out what was going on with the star. After working with NASA to rule out technical issues that might have caused the oddities, they scrutinized the star itself for evidence that it might be unusually young, as very young stars have disks of warm dust, gas, and rocks orbiting them that can create all sorts of strange behavior.
The star proved to be completely pedestrian: Not only does it appear to be mature and lack any disk of material, it showed no other signs of peculiarity, either. If not for the Kepler data, the star would attract no attention at all...
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/the-most-mysterious-star-in-our-galaxy/482397/
The star proved to be completely pedestrian: Not only does it appear to be mature and lack any disk of material, it showed no other signs of peculiarity, either. If not for the Kepler data, the star would attract no attention at all...
It isn't a large planet either.
It was the chart above that caught amateur astronomers’ attention. The chart shows data collected over 1,500 days of observation (showed on the x-axis). Each dip on the y-axis is a dimming event. Although these dips would normally indicate the presence of a planet, the weird thing about KIC 8462852’s dimming is how big it is. At its largest, it shows the star dimming by more than 22%, which is 10 times bigger than the dimming observed by a Jupiter-sized planet crossing a similar-sized star. Thus, it seems likely that the dimming wasn’t caused by a planet, but something else...
Here is a neat sketch done by the talented Tomas Overbai.
It's of the legendary Paul Atreides.
Even if it doesn't pan out, the fact that we're looking, that at this point we're even able to look, or to start looking-- really cool.
Actually incredible. What is it?
We don't know. But whatever it is, it is bound to be fascinating.
