1,481 light years from Earth<\/a>, something strange started happening to a star known as KIC 8462852. You can\u2019t see it with your naked eye; we know it exists only because the Kepler Space Telescope picked up the light coming from it, along with light from many thousands of other stars. One way astronomers can tell if there are planets orbiting a distant star is by tracking the brightness of the light the star emits. If a star\u2019s light dims a tiny bit at regular intervals, that\u2019s evidence that something is passing between it and the telescope. For a star the size of KIC 8462852, which is around one and a half times as big as our own sun, having a planet the size of Jupiter pass in front of it should dim the light by around one percent.<\/p>\nSince scientists began watching KIC 8462852, they\u2019ve found that its light does dim \u2014 but not at regular intervals. And it doesn\u2019t dim by one percent. It dims by \u2026 15 percent. And 22 percent. The dimming doesn\u2019t happen symmetrically, with a slight, gradual fade followed by a slight, gradual brightening. It can dim slowly and then rapidly brighten. Per Slate, \u201cThere\u2019s also an apparent change in brightness that seems to go up and down roughly every 20 days for weeks, then disappears completely.\u201d This is not the way stars normally behave. In fact, after having looked at thousands of other stars captured by the Kepler, this is the only<\/i> star known to astronomers to behave this way. They\u2019ve rechecked their data to see if there\u2019s an error in the math or some sort of flaw in the lens, but if there were, you would expect to see the same sort of error in other stars\u2019 measurements. Again: This is the only star that seems to operate this way.<\/p>\n
One possibility is that it\u2019s a young star, (relatively) recently formed, with lots of dust and debris still circling around it in the aftermath. That would explain the irregular dimming \u2014 except that the dust that surrounds young stars typically leaves a signature of infrared light, and KIC 8462852 doesn\u2019t have that. Same goes for the idea of a nearby planetary collision. Lots of dust should mean lots of infrared reflections, but KIC 8462852 is emitting just the right amount of infrared light you\u2019d expect from a normal star its size. The working hypothesis for now on what\u2019s behind the strange dimming phenomenon is that it\u2019s actually an enormous swarm of comets that were somehow sucked towards the star, possibly by the gravitational pull of another nearby star in transit, and are now burning off like fireworks all around it. That would explain the irregular, unpredictable dimming coupled with the lack of elevated infrared. The New Scientist explains:<\/p>\n
Having worked through the other possibilities, the team concluded the most likely explanation is a family of exocomets that veered close to the star and were broken up by its gravity, producing huge amounts of dust and gas in the process. If the comets are on an eccentric orbit passing in front of the star every 700 days or so, further breaking up and spreading out as they go, that could explain all the dips in the data.<\/p>\n
KIC 8462852 is about 50 per cent larger than our sun, so if this comet explanation is correct, the dust cloud would be pretty big. It would be an impressive sight up close, says Boyajian. Something that size in our solar system would blot out a significant amount of sunlight. When Earth passes through the debris clouds left in interplanetary space by passing comets, we get meteor showers. There\u2019s no evidence of a planet in the KIC 8462852 system, but someone standing on such a world as it passed through the dust cloud would see quite a light show, says Boyajian. \u201cThe scale of the meteor shower would be huge, like cosmic-scale fireworks.\u201d<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s where a more intelligent commentator would be useful because I don\u2019t understand why the dust generated by an enormous storm of comets disintegrating around the star wouldn\u2019t also generate an elevated infrared reading. I\u2019m also having trouble conceptualizing the scope of a storm that could dim the light of the star by 22 percent when a mass the size of Jupiter could only manage one percent. And scientists have another problem with the theory: It seems remarkably coincidental that KIC 8462852 would be in the process of devouring a massive comet cluster just at the moment that we happened to point our telescope at it \u2014 the blink of an eye cosmically. How long would the heat and gravity from the star realistically take to suck a belt of comets into it? And we somehow caught that on the Kepler, in progress, in the few years that the telescope was functioning properly? That\u2019s some luck.<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the other theory. The Atlantic:<\/p>\n
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star\u2019s light pattern is consistent with a \u201cswarm of megastructures,\u201d perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,\u201d Wright told me. \u201cAliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.\u201d<\/p>\n
The theory, in other words, is that the energy from KIC 8462852 is being harnessed by some sort of planetary-sized structure of solar panels or something akin to that \u2014 a \u201cDyson sphere,\u201d<\/a> named after Freeman Dyson, who imagined that alien civilizations would figure out a way to satisfy their energy needs by milking local stars for it. A star\u2019s just a big nuclear reactor, right? Might as well hook up some power lines to it and enjoy the juice. How a Dyson sphere would explain the data from this star isn\u2019t clear to me, except as the end of a \u201cno other theory works\u201d process of elimination. Any sort of technology we can imagine, however massive, that\u2019s pumping energy from KIC 8462852 would be in orbit around it, no? That means, I would think, that we should be seeing regular dimming intervals, not irregular ones, as the Dyson sphere transits around the star. The answer to that, I guess, is that maybe the dimming isn\u2019t the product of a shadow passing in front of the star but the star itself actually temporarily losing luster as energy is drained from it, like the lightbulbs in a home momentarily dimming when there\u2019s a sudden surge of demand on the grid. That\u2019s hard to conceptualize too, but that\u2019s the beauty of this theory, I guess. Whatever\u2019s happening is so freaky deaky weird that you can indulge whatever flight of fancy you like in imagining how this technology would work. Who knows? Maybe it\u2019s a giant Death Star and dims whenever it\u2019s firing at Alderaan or whatever the aliens\u2019 latest target is.<\/p>\nThe Kepler telescope no longer works so astronomers don\u2019t know what\u2019s been happening with KIC 8462852 lately. The next step now is to point a giant antenna at the star and see if any unusual radio signals come back. If they do, hoo boy.<\/p>\n
Blair Shorney<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
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Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.<\/p>\n
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Chaos Manor View, Friday, October 16, 2015 I\u2019ve been overwhelmed with stuff, all urgent in the sense that it can\u2019t be ignored. And now it\u2019s past time for lunch. The Dyson\u2019s Sphere speculation is fun, but hardly urgent\u2026 Dyson Sphere on Space? While it’s still too early to tell, and \u2026 Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-view"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26846"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26846\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jerrypournelle.com\/chaosmanor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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