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The latest news in the field of "It might be aliens, but in reality it's almost certainly not." Strange Signals from the Nearby Red Dwarf Star Ross 128

Okay. Everyone heard about KIC 8462852? The slowly dimming star that sometimes gets occluded by 'something' orbiting it?

Scientists tried and failed to explain the phenomenon for example by impossibly big asteroid and comet swarms or a secondary brown dwarf orbiting the primary star. All failed to explain one or two other things. For four years, people with Ph.D's and CSc's in astrophysics tried and failed to account for every strange thing that happen around the star and create an overarching theory that could explain dozens of anomalies in one theory. Nothing sticks..but it actually really being Aliens.

Well. Don't be confused anymore. Because the dimming process has now accelerated to an epxonential curve and the star will disappear within twenty years and a hundred/thousand years.

Video summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANSFcswnyAM

TL;DR: It truly seems that someone out there is building a star system sized Dreadstar.

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Measure a star for 70 days, make predictions about 20 years in the future. I guess we'll see what happens.

Fitting a curve to an irregularly fluctuating set of data points is 20% science and 80% bullshit. You can make the curve look like anything you want.

There could be all kinds of things going on in that system... one or more planets that came too close and were torn apart and are in the process of either falling into the star or being ejected... a chunky proplyd... any phenomenon that is not stable and is in the process of changing. Frankly, I would expect the signature of an artificial structure to be extremely regular, so I don't see how that hypothesis answers any questions.

I always get suspicious if the main "result" they deliver is a video...

I'd bet more on a highly variable set of flare cycles, or an orphan black hole orbited by a set of massive clouds, than aliens.

And KIC 8462852 continues to be super mega bullshit. Now it has an exponentially dimming downward trend. Jesus Christ!

HOLY SHIT BATMAN!

Oh jezus.... We are, from a simple point of explanation, just moving relatively so, that thr accretion disc of Tabby's star is oriented such, that our view passes more and more along thr disc plane, and the angle is getting smaller.
That alone could explain it all.

Bye bye mystery.

Krulle wrote:Oh jezus.... We are, from a simple point of explanation, just moving relatively so, that thr accretion disc of Tabby's star is oriented such, that our view passes more and more along thr disc plane, and the angle is getting smaller.
That alone could explain it all.

Bye bye mystery.

Accretion disc was considered two fucking years ago and left because there is no fucking IR heat up of dust happening. NONE.

Why should it heat up?
There is no indication that the sun emits more heat than the system radiates, therefore ther is no IR buildup.
They considered a formation of accretion disc.
But I suspect that our viewpoint moves, and that we are now watching more and more along the plane towards the sun, and therefore more and more throigh the middle of the disc.

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Are fucking years different from regular years?

At this point, I think a simple accretion disk is not a likely candidate, for the same reasons that an alien mega-structure is not a likely candidate. In a dyson sphere/swarm scenario, IR increases as visible light decreases, as an inescapable requirement of thermodynamics. (If you ask me, the most promising candidate for a dyson sphere/swarm is still object x, in the triangulum galaxy.

At present, I'd put my money either on Tabby's star actually being a complex system of stars, like 4 or more, possibly with rings or accretion disks involved as well. That, or it is a star approaching the end of it's hydrogen cycle.

Krulle: energy input equals energy output. Dust heats up when it absorbs sunlight, and will reach equilibrium when the radiated EM equals the absorbed EM, but with a peak in the IR instead. We're seeing a lot of light being blocked without seeing the expected re-radiated IR that a cloud of dust would have. And KIC 8462852 is over 1200 lightyears from Earth, we'd have to move 20-some light years to change our perspective by one degree.

A Dyson sphere and a disk of rock and dust will both convert visible light to IR, but the Dyson sphere may do so directionally. At the early stages, when it is a collection of structures in belt of similar orbits, the best directions to radiate would be toward the poles, toward the parts of sky most clear of other structures, which would also mean away from anyone seeing the star being occluded by those structures.

However, a simpler answer would be that it's a material that's not heating up. Ices would just sublimate as they absorb heat. We may be seeing an "orbital snowstorm" aftermath of some collision of icy planets a few centuries or millennia ago. There could be multiple ring systems and debris belts involved, clusters of material in elliptical orbits of different periods, etc, explaining the erratic and irregular dimming. This wouldn't last forever, but it's not like we're seeing stars behaving like this all over the place, so it may be we just got lucky with this one. If this is the case, the evaporating material should be visible with sufficiently high-quality spectral measurements.

As far as I'm aware, the star itself being the cause has been ruled out. A star can only change brightness by changing size (which is far too slow) or by changing temperature (which is too slow and doesn't match spectral observations). A star that rapidly dims without major changes in its spectrum is being blocked by something in front of it.

Mjolnir wrote:As far as I'm aware, the star itself being the cause has been ruled out. A star can only change brightness by changing size (which is far too slow) or by changing temperature (which is too slow and doesn't match spectral observations). A star that rapidly dims without major changes in its spectrum is being blocked by something in front of it.

How would my flare or black hole suggestions compare?

Absalom wrote:

Mjolnir wrote:As far as I'm aware, the star itself being the cause has been ruled out. A star can only change brightness by changing size (which is far too slow) or by changing temperature (which is too slow and doesn't match spectral observations). A star that rapidly dims without major changes in its spectrum is being blocked by something in front of it.

How would my flare or black hole suggestions compare?

Flare activity would be more pronounced and Black Holes would lens the image of the star when orbiting in front of it.

Absalom wrote:

Mjolnir wrote:As far as I'm aware, the star itself being the cause has been ruled out. A star can only change brightness by changing size (which is far too slow) or by changing temperature (which is too slow and doesn't match spectral observations). A star that rapidly dims without major changes in its spectrum is being blocked by something in front of it.

How would my flare or black hole suggestions compare?

There is a distinct maximum brightness with only minor variations, with irregular but sharply defined dips. Small stars with strong magnetic fields can be highly variable, but it's hard to see how such activity would just intermittently dim the star, and do so by such large amounts. A black hole would cause a very smooth and uniform variation, and a large amount of material orbiting the black hole would form an accretion disk with its own obvious emissions.

It seems pretty certain that this is mundane matter of some form occluding the star, it's just the specific form of that matter that is rather baffling. Too cold for a dust disk, too irregular for planets, far too much of it for it to be comets...

Mjolnir wrote:

Absalom wrote:

Mjolnir wrote:As far as I'm aware, the star itself being the cause has been ruled out. A star can only change brightness by changing size (which is far too slow) or by changing temperature (which is too slow and doesn't match spectral observations). A star that rapidly dims without major changes in its spectrum is being blocked by something in front of it.

How would my flare or black hole suggestions compare?

There is a distinct maximum brightness with only minor variations, with irregular but sharply defined dips. Small stars with strong magnetic fields can be highly variable, but it's hard to see how such activity would just intermittently dim the star, and do so by such large amounts. A black hole would cause a very smooth and uniform variation, and a large amount of material orbiting the black hole would form an accretion disk with its own obvious emissions.

It seems pretty certain that this is mundane matter of some form occluding the star, it's just the specific form of that matter that is rather baffling. Too cold for a dust disk, too irregular for planets, far too much of it for it to be comets...

If "far too much" is the best argument against comets, then I'd say the continuum between that and your "orbital snowstorm" is the best contender... at least in this thread. Haven't looked into it elsewhere, after all.

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In other interesting news. Radio telescopes have detected a repeating Fast Radio Burst source.
Galaxy sends out 15 high energy radio bursts

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This one's been big news in the science community: Colliding Neutron Stars Detected, Support Predictions as Source of Heavy Metals

Haumea appears to have a ring.