Merged Tabby's Star / One Scary Star

JeanTate said:
Here's an interesting question: how would you test any of the ideas put forward to explain the optical (Kepler) data?

Specifically, what telescopes (etc) would you point towards the star (or nearby)? What sorts of signatures would you look for? Would observing in something other than the electromagnetic spectrum - neutrinos, say, or cosmic rays - help to test at least some of the ideas?
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In one of the links it suggests looking at the dips. Exactly how long does it take for it to dip? You could also look at the frequencies. If they dipped at slightly different times then the body may have an atmosphere.
 
rjh01 said:
In one of the links it suggests looking at the dips. Exactly how long does it take for it to dip? You could also look at the frequencies. If they dipped at slightly different times then the body may have an atmosphere.
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That would have to be a monster of a planet.
 
JeanTate said:
Here's an interesting question: how would you test any of the ideas put forward to explain the optical (Kepler) data?

Specifically, what telescopes (etc) would you point towards the star (or nearby)? What sorts of signatures would you look for? Would observing in something other than the electromagnetic spectrum - neutrinos, say, or cosmic rays - help to test at least some of the ideas?
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The next, best test, would probably be to try and figure out what the material occulting the star is made out of. To do that though, you have to be watching the star during the next dip in light which is difficult because these type of telescopes aren't cheap to operate and are being used for a lot of other things. To keep it them pointed at the star for an unknown amount of time until the next dip happens would be rather difficult to do.
 
foophil said:
The next, best test, would probably be to try and figure out what the material occulting the star is made out of. To do that though, you have to be watching the star during the next dip in light which is difficult because these type of telescopes aren't cheap to operate and are being used for a lot of other things. To keep it them pointed at the star for an unknown amount of time until the next dip happens would be rather difficult to do.
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Could a small telescope do the job? At least until a dip is noticed and then the job goes to a bigger one.
 
rjh01 said:
Could a small telescope do the job? At least until a dip is noticed and then the job goes to a bigger one.
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I don't think so. I believe that the article I read (which I can't find now... I think it was an article by the Bad Astronomer - Phil Plait) stated that only a handful of the larger telescopes in the world can tell what the intervening stuff is made out of during a blip, and that of course there is currently only one telescope (which is not on Earth) that can detect the blips happening.

The thought was to keep that telescope pointed in that general direction (it can observe many stars at once) until a blip happens, then notify the world so that whatever side of Earth is facing that direction can have their handful of telescopes point at it, hopefully in time.

The downside of course is nobody knows when the next blip would happen. Keeping the one telescope that can currently detect the blips pointed at that star for a long time could be rather wasteful.


ETA - Actually, the blog in the OP covers it pretty nicely near the end. It goes over what is needed to detect what the material is made out of that is blocking the light and how to go about it (and why it would be costly to do so).
 
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foophil said:
I don't think so. I believe that the article I read (which I can't find now... I think it was an article by the Bad Astronomer - Phil Plait) stated that only a handful of the larger telescopes in the world can tell what the intervening stuff is made out of during a blip, and that of course there is currently only one telescope (which is not on Earth) that can detect the blips happening.

The thought was to keep that telescope pointed in that general direction (it can observe many stars at once) until a blip happens, then notify the world so that whatever side of Earth is facing that direction can have their handful of telescopes point at it, hopefully in time.

The downside of course is nobody knows when the next blip would happen. Keeping the one telescope that can currently detect the blips pointed at that star for a long time could be rather wasteful.


ETA - Actually, the blog in the OP covers it pretty nicely near the end. It goes over what is needed to detect what the material is made out of that is blocking the light and how to go about it (and why it would be costly to do so).
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Am not interested about working out what the material is made from, I am only interested in detecting that a dip is happening. A few small robotic telescopes should be able to do that sort of thing. As soon as they detect something then the bigger telescopes are pointed to the star and more observations are made.

The star is apparent magnitude 11 which is only about 1/25 of what the human eye can see. So a telescope with a 10 cm wide mirror should be able to do this.
 
Possible? I can not say.

But I will say, that i belive the whole Dyson sphere thing is just click baiting by the Scientists in question.

Its becoming a more and more common thing. TO be honest I'm over it.

Science should be science, not PR and marketing and click bait and Niel De Grass Tyson in Zoolander and that british professor bloke on Tv all the time, and Michu Kaku chiming in with sillyness on any tv program that will have him.

This whole movement of popular science journalism nonsense kind of started with Sagan, and then Hawking.

And I am not a fan of what it has done. And how people now perceive science as a result
 
esspee said:
Possible? I can not say.

But I will say, that i belive the whole Dyson sphere thing is just click baiting by the Scientists in question.

Its becoming a more and more common thing. TO be honest I'm over it.

Science should be science, not PR and marketing and click bait and Niel De Grass Tyson in Zoolander and that british professor bloke on Tv all the time, and Michu Kaku chiming in with sillyness on any tv program that will have him.

This whole movement of popular science journalism nonsense kind of started with Sagan, and then Hawking.

And I am not a fan of what it has done. And how people now perceive science as a result
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It's not all clickbait:

"Beam us up, Scotty. There’s no signs of intelligent life out there. At least, no obvious signs, according to a recent survey performed by researchers at Penn State University. After reviewing data taken by the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope of over 100,000 galaxies, there appears to be little evidence that advanced, spacefaring civilizations exist in any of them."

http://www.universetoday.com/119931/100000-galaxies-and-no-obvious-signs-of-life/
 
WhatRoughBeast said:
The exception is if, as I mentioned, you beam the microwaves out of the system for use somewhere else.
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the logical choice would be to use all that beamed power to interstellar travel. Lower than light, or who knows, maybe to create wormholes.

this star may be wholly natural, but even so, it´s so strange that deserves lots of investigation so we can understand it.


and extraordinary claims of ultra advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations require extraordinary proof. Maybe it is. Probably not. We shall wait and see.
 
Tabby talked about the possibility of dispersing the heat energy a megastructure would generate.

So, what could possibly be causing these dips?
 
Dr.Sid said:
I'm not saying it's aliens ..
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But...


It's aliens. I predict alien megastructure.

And I'll give a reasoning for my answer: As we begin to fill in the Drake equation, the variables have all been positive, regaring alien life. At first we weren't sure about the number of exoplanets. Now we know they're the norm. Then we weren't sure about rocky planets and habitability zones and now we know there are a lot of rocky planets in habitable zones. I predict the trend will continue and other variables will be alien-friendly: we'll discover signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres in a couple years....

ETA: I think that this idea that we occupy some incredibly special place in the uinvirse where intelligent life can develop is ego-based, will be disproven as our technology improves, and will eventually be looked back upon as a kind of bio-centrism.
 
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Fudbucker said:
But...


It's aliens. I predict alien megastructure.

And I'll give a reasoning for my answer: As we begin to fill in the Drake equation, the variables have all been positive, regaring alien life. At first we weren't sure about the number of exoplanets. Now we know they're the norm. Then we weren't sure about rocky planets and habitability zones and now we know there are a lot of rocky planets in habitable zones. I predict the trend will continue and other variables will be alien-friendly: we'll discover signs of life in exoplanet atmospheres in a couple years....

ETA: I think that this idea that we occupy some incredibly special place in the uinvirse where intelligent life can develop is ego-based, will be disproven as our technology improves, and will eventually be looked back upon as a kind of bio-centrism.
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And I predict that, unless we can shake hands with them or look at them under a microscope, we will continue to insist that there must be some other natural explanation for whatever we see, even to the point of violating Occam's razor. Extraterrestrial life is always considered to be the least likely hypothesis. The reasons for this go beyond scientific thinking.

Researchers fear being ridiculed and called cranks. This is because there in fact has been a lot of crankiness involving UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles, etc. No one wants to be lumped in with that kind of nonsense.
 
I saw an article today about a new paper on Tabby's star, so here it is if anyone is interested:

We just got even weirder results about the 'alien megastructure' star

I think something weird must be going on with the star itself, not something blocking the light.

But basically what Kepler saw was KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, dimming at such an incredible rate that it can't solely be explained by any of the leading hypotheses we had: comet swarms, or the effects of a warped star.
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What they saw was that, not only did the star's light output occasionally dip by 20 percent - the weird behaviour scientists first spotted last year - but over the course of the observations, its entire stellar flux actually dimmed.

For the first 1,000 days Kepler was observing the star, that diminishing wasn't too extreme - the star dropped in luminosity by about 0.34 percent per year.

But over the next 200 days, the star dimmed more than 2 percent before levelling off. In total, the star lost around 3 percent of its total luminosity during the four-year period.

The researchers analysed data on 193 nearby stars, and 355 stars that are similar to Tabby's star, and couldn't find anything else like it.

So what does that mean? Well, we still don't really know.
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And here is the paper itself:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01316v1.pdf
 
Fudbucker said:
The star itself dimmed 20%? Is that possible?
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I don't know, but no really good explanation has been proposed.

We examine whether the rapid decline could be caused by a cloud of transiting circumstellar material, finding while such a cloud could evade detection in sub-mm observations, the transit ingress and duration cannot be explained by a simple cloud model. Moreover, this model cannot account for the observed longer-term dimming. No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.
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