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Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting a star in the Milky Way

andrew123

By andrew123
in Science & Spaceflight

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Green Baron

Green Baron

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Well, in the moment Tabby's star is, which led to the speculation someone might be closing the doors of a dyson sphere. But why should aliens build the fantasies of an earthly science-fiction author ?

There are indeed more stars around with a weird twitch in the eye. For EPIC a protoplanetary disc was identified as a probable cause for a 65% dimming. That seems banal, but it could be an explanation for KIC as well.

 

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SinBad

SinBad

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So, it dimmed twice over 700ish days. Commetary occlusions in the target system have been mentioned, but a dimming of that magnitude would mean lots of big comets.

What about a small object in our own oort cloud? Just random chance that a couple of grains of sand happened to line up with this star 700ish days apart. How big does one of our own oort objects need to be before it can occlude a star at 1500ly? And how small does it need to be before we cant see it?

As for the repeated dimming, im going to out on a limb here and site terry pratchett: a million to one odds usually means its a near certainty.

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Green Baron

Green Baron

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My thoughts: The problem with this is that initially people went with half baked ideas to the social media before coming to a conclusion in the scientific community. Now it's too late, the aliens are out of the box and the discussion is taking place in forums, magazines and preprint servers. Even if a natural cause was proven people wouldn't stop planting aliens in that system.

There is a whole class of dimming stars, are they all dimmed by aliens ?

 

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Rakaydos

Rakaydos

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9 hours ago, Green Baron said:

 

Well, in the moment Tabby's star is, which led to the speculation someone might be closing the doors of a dyson sphere. But why should aliens build the fantasies of an earthly science-fiction author ?

Why are WE building the fantasies of science fiction authors?

Nuclear submarines, geosynchronus satelites, even smartphones were predicted at least once by the wild mass guessing that is science fiction.

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Bill Phil

Bill Phil

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1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:

Why are WE building the fantasies of science fiction authors?

Nuclear submarines, geosynchronus satelites, even smartphones were predicted at least once by the wild mass guessing that is science fiction.

Don't forget tanks, atom bombs, or spaceflight in general.

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kerbiloid

kerbiloid

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Posted (edited)
21 hours ago, Green Baron said:

But why should aliens build the fantasies of an earthly science-fiction author ?

Indeed. Maybe this is just a giant interstellar amoeba eating the stars. And it doesn't build Dyson spheres. It is a natural Dyson sphere.

Edited by kerbiloid
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monophonic

monophonic

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12 hours ago, Rakaydos said:

Why are WE building the fantasies of science fiction authors?

Nuclear submarines, geosynchronus satelites, even smartphones were predicted at least once by the wild mass guessing that is science fiction.

Also underground lizard people, teleports, godzillae, alien invasions...

Shotgun guessing + confirmation bias does not make accurate predictions.

23 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Indeed. Maybe this is just a giant interstellar amoeba eating the stars. And it doesn't build Dyson spheres. It is a natural Dyson sphere.

Great book btw. :)

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CptRichardson

CptRichardson

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18 hours ago, SinBad said:

So, it dimmed twice over 700ish days. Commetary occlusions in the target system have been mentioned, but a dimming of that magnitude would mean lots of big comets.

What about a small object in our own oort cloud? Just random chance that a couple of grains of sand happened to line up with this star 700ish days apart. How big does one of our own oort objects need to be before it can occlude a star at 1500ly? And how small does it need to be before we cant see it?

As for the repeated dimming, im going to out on a limb here and site terry pratchett: a million to one odds usually means its a near certainty.

It's dimmed twice approximately 20% or so (or was it 10%?) either way, way too much for a normal natural phenomenon. More importantly, we detected uneven dipping, and these dips lasted for multiple days. Oh, and the whole '5% drop or so over the course of the kepler observations'.

Basically, to also point to Sir Pratchett, these aren't mere million to one odds, these are billions to one odds that seem to be lining up just right, and honestly we don't have anything else that's stood up.

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Findthepin1

Findthepin1

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I was reading about the star on Reddit and I found an interesting thread that I thought I should say something about here. The OP of that thread (not me) noticed that the depths of the dips in the star's light are very close to being simple multiples of each other. Here is that that thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/53v0iz/the_depths_of_the_major_dips_of_boyajians_star/

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Siddharth55

Siddharth55

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What about the WOW! Signal .... Probably they have left a radio signal a long time ago and got so scattered that we only caught it for a few minutes .... And by now (if their tech is more advance) (and if the realised our existance) they might have shot an eventually more advance beam of mode of communication which we donot understand (as of now!).

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Streetwind

Streetwind

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Oh, the scientists are keeping theirs sharp, no worries.

The curious thing about this star is that the application of Occam's Razor has failed not just once, but several times. They still don't know why the heck this is happening. That's why people start entertaining weird thoughts.

But hey, I consider "if we were to see a Dyson Swarm, it could look something like this" a valid thought experiment. You shouldn't go and take this to mean that we are looking at one, but why not run a few models on the side when we already have the data anway? Maybe it leads to a new sort of insight into orbital structures and some guy saying "I can prove this is not a Dyson Swarm because observation XYZ clearly doesn't agree with how it should look like because <insert new fact>". And then we can razor that particular hypothesis away much more precisely in future observations of weird star behaviors... or, god forbid, confirm it more precisely, should that ever actually happen. :P

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Green Baron

Green Baron

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But, we have already discussed it ....

Cheers, gb

 

Edit: ... dimming the hopes/beliefs in alien megastructures:

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.117.261101

Again i feel urged to cite the first sentences in the prefaces of most physics/astronomy/cosmology books: Natural science is about explaining nature. Tools are physics and mathemagic. Aliens or creators are not natural science because they offer an unfair and illegitimate shortcut through the understanding of nature.

That does not mean that aliens do not exist but until proven otherwise working without them has a higher chance for us to understand nature.

Humbly supposes the gb with a red Christmas cap :-)

 

 

Editedit: to summarize the outcome of the paper, because i found it hard to understand. The star could be in a state of selforganized criticality. Like a system that is on the edge between two states, e.g. magnetism switching or so. Thus parts of the star are temporarily in one state, other parts in another. The paper is based on statistical analysis, but there are more stars with a similar behaviour.

 

Edited by Green Baron
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