Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com)

gurps_npc writes: Phil Plait just wrote an interesting article about a star that is extremely variable. We generally look for cyclical, minute (1%) variations in star light to detect planets. But we found one that has a variation in starlight of over 20%. We don't have a very good explanation for this, and some people are speculating that such variation could be caused by a civilization building a Dyson Sphere around the star. From the article: "Such a sphere would be dark in visible light, but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we've never seen one (obviously). Which brings us back to KIC 8462852 (PDF). What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star's light." Plait says it's overwhelmingly unlikely, but interesting nonetheless.

Comments

Coalescing gas clouds?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are there natural explanations for oddly-shaped globs revolving around a star?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Rei]

It could also be God, slowly orbiting around the star while chatting with Jesus.

I mean, while we're here positing off-the-wall concepts like Dyson Spheres on the basis of nothing more than "a star regularly dims 20% in a cycle"...

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[mschaffer]

It could be anything; a faulty stench coil...some cheese on the lens.... Who knows?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Elder Entropist]

According to the article, it isn't in a cycle.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Piata]

That's one of the most confusing parts though; the dips in light are not regular. From the article:

"It turns out there are lots of these dips in the star’s light. Hundreds. And they don’t seem to be periodic at all. They have odd shapes to them, too. A planet blocking a star’s light will have a generally symmetric dip; the light fades a little, remains steady at that level, then goes back up later. The dip at 800 days in the KIC 8462852 data doesn’t do that; it drops slowly, then rises more rapidly. Another one at 1,500 days has a series of blips up and down inside the main dips. There’s also an apparent change in brightness that seems to go up and down roughly every 20 days for weeks, then disappears completely. It’s likely just random transits, but still. It’s bizarre."

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Austerity Empowers]

So your hypothesis is that God possibly had a bit too much nebular burrito over at the Wolf's Head, stopped by the kid's house at KIC 8462852, they're chatting, meanwhile God is literallly sharting up some form of giant gas/astroid cloud, and that's causing aperiodic incidents of 20% light dimming?

Could be, we should get a guy working on this hypothesis to make sure all the bases are covered. We should also attempt to locate the Febreeze cluster, because someone is going to need to drop a heavy dose there.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[ngc5194]

There are possibilities, but there are observational problems with all the most obvious ones. For example, if the star were surrounded by a large gas cloud, we'd expect to see an excess of stellar energy in the infrared. As Plait explains, we don't see that.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Rei]

You mean, like something broken up passing in front of the star? Which is the leading hypothesis presented in the paper?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[SQLGuru]

Could this not be explained by multiple objects orbiting at various distances and eccentricities? Like possibly some objects that formed during star formation and some captured objects?

** - Long list of disclaimers indicating I'm by no means anyone who would be considered an expert on this subject (I didn't even bother to read the article).

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[QuadEddie]

Viewed long enough, we would still understand a periodic schedule. We could eventually model the objects. Maybe we haven't viewed it long enough.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Hognoxious]

Is it possible that they're fragments of a collision and haven't become periodic yet - too busy colliding and accreting and all that kind of shit?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[amRadioHed]

Did you read the article? I'm guessing you didn't read the article.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Coren22]

According to Phil, that theory doesn't work well as something more would show up under IR, and in this case, the IR is as expected. Phil was suggesting the possibility of comets from the star's Oort cloud being disturbed by a red dwarf of the designation KIC 8462852.

The Bad Astronomy article is well worth the read. I haven't read the paper though.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Coren22]

A hot Jupiter could occlude enough light to drop the star's output by 1%. The dips in this star are in the range of 15-20%, and they are non periodic.

Also, the IR from the star is the amount expected for the type of star, so it likely isn't a dust cloud as that would glow in IR as well.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[JoeMerchant]

So, a chaotically orbiting asteroid belt can't accomplish the same thing?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Bengie]

That blocks 20% of the star's light? Asteroid belts are mostly empty.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[meadow]

Does anyone know if any of the extremely large telescopes being planned/built will have the capability of resolving the star in sufficient detail to determine what is happening?

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[kimvette]

The telescope got jammed
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[Bite The Pillow]

But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. Thatâ(TM)s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.

And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesnâ(TM)t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.

How many stars are in the galaxy? And we are comparing 150k out of that number? I would call that a non-representative sample.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[rioki]

The best part about the "it's a Dyson sphere" speculation? It's never mentioned in the paper...

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[tehcyder]

That blocks 20% of the star's light? Asteroid belts are mostly empty.

It could be a special type of asteroid belt. Organised by aliens from an anti-matter universe.

Re:Coalescing gas clouds?

[UnknownSoldier]

> From the article:

Which one? And which page is that on?

Because I'm not seeing that phrase in the PDF:

* http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.0362...

Nor in the main article:

* http://www.theatlantic.com/sci...

Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it was a Dyson Sphere, we wouldn't be seeing any light at all from it.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[unencode200x]

I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this?

Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like the second Death Star

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFS

"Such a sphere would be dark in visible light, but emit a lot of infrared."

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps it has big gaps in it so they can move big planet sized ships in and out. Perhaps their advanced knowledge has shown them it's the proper way to build a dyson sphere.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[willworkforbeer]

That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.

But if their Congressional funding got cut mid-sphere... Dyson's Bowl.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[kwiecmmm]

If it was a Dyson Sphere, we wouldn't be seeing any light at all from it.

Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light? Unless you are in a different solar system, but then you run into the issue of needing to transfer the power great distances.

I guess this would only work if you setup a solar system to be mined with robots or maybe to create a wormhole. Otherwise you would need some light to get through.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[guruevi]

A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Your geek credentials have just been revoked.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[myrdos2]

Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?

The idea is that you live inside of the sphere, and can convert all of the sun's rays into useful energy.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Electricity Likes Me]

The only problem is there's no actual excess of IR emission from the star - which is one of the reasons they've ruled out a lot of conventional dust-cloud and asteroid belt explanations.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away.

The Senegalese people don't need shoes, as they walk barefoot. That's what your reasoning sounds like.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[wonkey_monkey]

Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?

Think about it. Or Google it.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[wonkey_monkey]

We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet

If 99% of the sunlight reaching the planet was suddenly blocked, I think you'd quickly redefine what you mean by "need."

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Electricity Likes Me]

It could also simply be *not a dyson sphere*. A matroshka brain would actually be somewhat more consistent - clouds of thinly spread dust, punctuated by a few planets or planet remnants in the process of being disassembled.

Seeing as how the star is never completely occulted, but the predicted object sizes for some scenarios have to be substantially larger then the star, then it would be somewhat more consistent.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Electricity Likes Me]

It is however a threshold situation. The tools and technology to build a solar panel to sustain us like that would make it cheaper to build the next one. Once we can do it once, economic growth would dictate that we pretty obviously should build another to get the most out of the investment. Repeat to the logical conclusion...

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[barbariccow]

I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this? Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?

The Dyson Sphere is moreso a ton of individual solar panels, that partially surround and orbit a star. Completely surrounding a star is not very likely, to be far enough away to not have molten metal that was once solar panels would be a HUGE area to cover. And also, what civilization would remove the heat and light from their own sun? Their planet would die in an effort to obtain the energy. And if you say "Another sun in another solar system", well... the energy transfer I believe would take far too long to be practical.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[funwithBSD]

Any scientist would apply Occam's Razor and look for a simpler natural explanation and not an Alien Species building a Dyson Sphere.

Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, the planet would be *inside* the Dyson Sphere...

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya know, it is possible to make a Dyson Ring on a different orbital angle than your planet, so it does not "die".

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Rei]

You know, right there in the abstract (don't even have to dig) is "... we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event." They already have a hypothesis.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[dpidcoe]

Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.

But ringworlds are unstable!

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[chthon]

Only if they get hit by giant meteors.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[alvinrod]

Well it's easy to test. If we continue to observe it over time and we keep seeing less and less light, which one would expect as they construct more and more of the sphere, then the hypothesis becomes more likely.

Of course given the distance of this star, if they were building a Dyson sphere, it might be finished by now (we'd only being seeing construction progress from ~1,500 years ago) and a civilization advanced enough to do that could probably travel the vast expanses of space, which they might well need to do in order to have enough suitable material to build a Dyson sphere.

One would think that if that were the case we'd notice some other strange anomalies in the area as well, but if everything else looks normal, it's less likely to be aliens and more likely to be some unknown phenomenon that we don't understand well or at all.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the theoretical reasons for a civilization to create a Dyson sphere (or ring) is that said civilization has mastered mind uploading/strong AI and need massive amounts of energy for computation.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[luis_a_espinal]

I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this? Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?

I'm no astronomer/astrophysicist, but I wonder if the 20% dim could be caused by a bunch of brown dwarfs floating in tight formation, or a recent collision among planets/planetoids that created a large cloud of debris, the one is still floating around the original center of mass, and which still has not have had enough time to disperse evenly around an orbit)?

Or maybe it's God... Jibbers Crabst!!!!

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.

Now witness the firepower of this fully ARMED and OPERATIONAL battle station!

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

As AC mentioned, there's no particular reason you have to orbit in the same plane as your planet - you could build a solid ring around our sun just just off the ecliptic, providing untold billions of times more power than currently reaches Earth, and only have to deal with a couple brief solar eclipses a year as we pass behind it. You could even put a small gap in the ring and tune its orbital speed so that the gap is always passing through the ecliptic during the window when there would otherwise be an eclipse, and never block the Earth's sunlight at all.

There's no inherent reason you even need to rely on orbital mechanics - for example graphene is far lighter than necessary to produce a solar sail that can hover over the sun on photon pressure alone, without orbiting at all - If you could build sufficiently low-density solar panels from the stuff you could slowly encase the sun in stationary solar panels - so long as you left empty a thin "equator" in the plane of the ecliptic you could capture 99.99..(???)% of the sun's radiation without shading the planets at all. In fact, unless those panels were 100% non-reflective you'd end up with a long thin "line" of reflected brightness passing behind the sun - you might need to put up some solar shades just to avoid *increasing* the light hitting the Earth too much.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dyson cage, more like. It wold be crazy to build a bowl shape first as it would be fighting the local sun's gravity on an unequal basis.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[slew]

Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?

Of course this question has been answered before... ;^p

"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[slew]

A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.

Or maybe quite a bit less than 1% (you know, global warming and all that stuff)...

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[mr_mischief]

If built large enough, the sphere could be outside your planet's orbit.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

Nah, terribly inefficient with materials, A Dyson sphere with a radius equivalent to Earth's average orbital distance would cover roughly 109 thousand, million, million square miles, at an average power density of only ~1.5kW/m^2. Build it instead at only a million miles distant (only ~twice the diameter of the sun) and you need cover 100,000 times less area to capture the same power, though admittedly the 13MW/m^2 might provide some engineering challenges.

Then just leave a minimally-occluded ring in the plane of the ecliptic and your planets, space stations, etc. don't get shaded much

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dyson cage, more like. It wold be crazy to build a bowl shape first as it would be fighting the local sun's gravity on an unequal basis.

A Dyson's sphere wouldn't work if you couldn't control gravity - everything on the inside would just fall into the central star.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

Actually, Dyson's original concept is a massive swarm of solar satellites or statites with no need for any superstructure. The idea of a single physical sphere came later, to say nothing of the ridiculous idea of living on the surface of the inner surface of the thing.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Except if it is rotating fast enough. No gravity control needed, just speed control.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[MightyMartian]

Fuck you! It was a fully armed and operational battle station!

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[MightyMartian]

<shakes head>

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Jason Levine]

The poster meant "need" as in "need to convert to electricity." Only a tiny fraction of sunlight reaches our planet. If we put an object in orbit around the sun such that it was always ahead of or behind us in orbit, it could collect solar radiation that would otherwise never touch Earth and could beam that power back to us. We could also put something in place above or below our orbital plane to collect the solar radiation that goes up or down (or what constitutes up and down in space relative to our orbital plane). In either case, if we could intercept the equivalent of 1-2% of the Earth's daily solar radiation (from radiation that would otherwise not hit the Earth), we could completely solve our energy needs. (Well, at least for the next few billion years. We'll leave that energy crisis to far-flung future generations to solve.)

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Our biosphere needs all that energy though (and we need our biosphere) to keep from descending into an ice age, but I understand what you're getting at. Which is one reason why I've always considered the contemporary Dyson sphere/shell/swarm concepts a little shaky. Building one would require an insane energy expenditure in terms of time, materials and power. You could capture most of the energy, with far fewer materials, labor and power expenditures by moving it/them from the Goldilocks zone (6-24 light minutes from sun) to as close to the sun as possible, the orbits of the swarm/ring/etc could be adjusted to avoid blocking sunlight to habited worlds as much as possible but still provide all the energy necessary for an interstellar civilization.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean how like we see everything in our own solar system orbiting the sun falling into the central star?

Oh wait... Apparently gravity doesn't work like that. Magnets maybe?

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Jason Levine]

This article says we'd need 20% efficient solar panels covering 191,817 square miles (496,803 square km) to supply the world's energy needs. Of course, these panels could be spread out across continents. Previously oil producing nations could easily become solar energy giants by placing tons of solar panels in their deserts. Houses could cut "from the grid" energy needs by placing solar panels on their roofs. The US could use desert lands in the south west to become energy independent.

With the cost of solar panels dropping and efficiency rising, the cost of this venture and the area needed is sure to shrink as time goes on.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[lgw]

If you're anywhere inside a symmetrical spherical shell, there's no gravitational pull from the shell. It all balances out. So, unless the sphere was spinning fast, you'd just fall into the sun - and you could only tune the spinning for one narrow band, you'd still get too much or too little everywhere else.

This problem is what inspired Larry Niven to publish his idea for a "ring world" - a more practical, lower tech approach. First as a non-fiction article in a SF mag, then as a series of SF novels. Now most people only know the idea Halo, sadly.

Plus a sphere isn't gravitationally stable - you'd have to constantly work to keep the star centered. Without some sort of gravity control, the whole idea is impractical, which is why finding one would be a big deal to physicists - we have no reason to think any such thing is possible today (but then, we don't have a good quantum gravity theory either).
 

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[cellocgw]

Original statement: "Ringworlds are unstable."
Response: "Only if they get hit by giant meteors."

No, that's incorrect. Larry mentions in one of is forewords that some nerdgeekcosmologists did a bunch of math to show that a ring spinning around a star is unstable in the sense that it'll drift such that the star is no longer at the center. Fortunately (back-filling :-) ) it turned out the Ringworld Engineers put in a bunch of stabilization mechanisms.
The big meteor led to other problems.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[viperidaenz]

And how do you proposed to rotate a sphere, so all surfaces are moving perpendicular to the star?

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, we had to do these calculations as part of physics class. A sphere around a star is stable; a ringworld is not.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[qvatch]

or, you know, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

Yes, but why would you waste the resources to make it so much bigger when you could get the same power output from something much smaller, and still be able to see the stars?. It's not like there's anything much interesting in our system outside the ecliptic, and there's not enough material available to fill even the ecliptic plane with a significant density of artificial structures

If you're *really* energy-miserly but still want your planets to get sunlight, then you could build just a secondary solar-ring outside the orbit of the outermost planet you care about, just wide enough to capture the bit that escapes through the "equator" in your sphere (probably somewhere around the size of our asteroid belt, Jupiter doesn't really get enough sunlight to be useful anyway), or better yet, just surround the star entirely and mount great big directional lights on the sphere to shine directly on the planets with the same spectrum.

The problem is the bigger you build it the less power density is available - at Earth's orbit we receive a measly 1.5kW/m^2, while at two solar radii we'd be getting around 13MW/m^2.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Coren22]

Um, a sphere is more unstable than a ring. The sphere has components in different orbits, which causes massive stresses on the structure. Both need massive stabilization to keep the star centered, which was the topic of at least one of the Ringworld books.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Coren22]

Why not an equatorial orbit that is always 90 deg before and after the planet's orbit.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[careysub]

Make it out of physically separate rings at varying angles of inclination.

No one said it was a solid sphere.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

The only way to get two things to orbit with the same period is to have them orbit at the same distance, so the panels would have to share the planet's orbit. Still, it would be perfectly viable if you're content with just a few biggish collectors catching a little extra solar power rather than large rings. For orbital stability you'd probably want them in Lagrange points 60* away from the planet (L4 and L5) instead of 90*, but that's a minor detail.

The big argument against doing it that way is that those exact same panels would collect even more power if you moved them closer to the sun - cut the distance in half and you quadruple the power hitting their surface. But that also shortens their orbital period, causing them to pass between the planet and sun on a regular basis. Fortunately that can be avoided simply by tilting their orbit onto a slightly different plane than the planet, then such eclipses can only occur for the two brief periods each year when the planet crossing the orbital plane of the solar panels.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Lije Baley]

Nah, Moore's other law predicts that the process will be down to 10 to the -10000th nm by then. Those AI CPUs will make more power than they use!

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

So does that mean that the sun is shining underneath people and not above them then? Kind of useless if you ask me... but better don't...

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

actually it was not a meteor, but white dwarf I think they called (core of supernova star after its explosion only 20 km in diameter but extremely dense)...

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[windwalkr]

This problem is what inspired Larry Niven to publish his idea for a "ring world" - a more practical, lower tech approach.

Larry Niven got this right in the later books, but only because a lot of his fans called him out on it.

Halo installations don't actually ring a star, so don't have this problem.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[delt0r]

And so are spheres. The original dyson sphere is not a sphere. What was proposed was in fact a swarm. There really is no reason to do ring worlds or sphere ones even if you could.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[coinreturn]

And how do you proposed to rotate a sphere, so all surfaces are moving perpendicular to the star?

You still stuck in 3 dimensions? Lame earthling!

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[war4peace]

could beam that power back to us.

How?

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Jason Levine]

There are a few ways of doing this.

Re: Swarm, not sphere.

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

His pattern indicates two-dimensional thinking.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[wierd_w]

One possible use for the energy, would be to blast material off of a gas giant.

This would enable somewhat efficient (ahem. Big grain of salt taken.) collection of material, because the collection vessels do not need to go deep into the giant's gravity well. They just need to be leeward of the high energy stream being shot at the planet.

I think 20% of a star's output would be more than enough to blow atmosphere off such a thing for more easy collection.

That poses a chicken and egg type problem though. If you can build a dyson sphere, why do you need to use such a trick just to get light gasses? The construction of the sphere would require similar levels of energy investiture.....

But if we are going for radical, unsubstantiated wild speculations---

Perturbations in local light trajectories caused by use of very large Alcubiere warp drives. Depending on the direction of travel of the object going to warp, and the requisite size of the warp distortion, light from the star would be bent in directions that prevent that light from reaching the earth (massive occultation) without producing any local IR re-emission, since the light never gets absorbed-- just redirected from the spacial curvature of the warp metric. This would neatly explain the irregular shape, and the lack of IR.

The inhabitants of that system need not be constructing a dyson swarm-- they may merely be FTL capable.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't be silly, they are just installing power source into new TARDIS.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[mr_mischief]

Maybe it's a super advanced Tea Party isolationist culture that doesn't want outside light. >_>

If you build it sturdy enough at the goldilocks zone, you could not just harvest light for electrical energy, but make much of the interior surface habitable for plant life. Also, perhaps a civilization wouldn't do this to their own star, but to a nearby star with no habitable natural bodies around it. Or they could use their entire planetary mass to build the sphere, and live in pods within the sphere.

Forget the interior surface spinning for false gravity, put structures on pylons inside it, with the floors perpendicular to the spin.

Perhaps if some civilization did do something like this, there wouldn't even be life in the solar system as it was done. It might all be robotic probes from the next system over.

As long as it's all speculation, we can speculate all sorts of things.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

>make much of the interior surface habitable for plant life

Only if they have artificial gravity generators, or grow well in freefall atmosphere-retaining domes.

Even then though to do such a thing you would need an *insane* amount of materials. Consider our own solar system - assuming a 1AU radius we're talking a surface area of over 4x10^25 square kilometers. If we converted the entire ~2x10^30kg of mass of our solar system into the sphere (including the ~99.9% of which is the sun itself), that's still only 50grams per square meter. that's only about 2/3 the mass of your average sheet of paper. Leave the sun in place so you still have a power source and you're down to only 50 milligrams per square meter. Good luck building much durability into that.

  If instead the sphere radius was only twice that of the sun itself, then the surface area would be only 3.4x10^19 - over a million times smaller. We could manage 50kg per square meter - far more than is likely necessary. And that would leave plenty of mass to build habitats, people, plants, etc.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[mr_mischief]

You're assuming a group would endeavor to build a totally enclosed sphere with the resources of only a single small system. That's a reasonable assumption, but perhaps they built only scaffolding and pods, with each pod having its own solar collectors nearby. Maybe they're bringing in material from several systems. Maybe it doesn't need to be habitable (at least not yet) because it's built by an advance team of robotic probes.

Any scenario that isn't an as yet unexplained natural phenomenon is already violating Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is most likely to be true. Once we're not worried about the most probable, then anything possible is within the realm of discussion.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

Sure, you *could* theoretically bring in material from another system, but that seems extremely unlikely - with the time and energy requirements necessary to move star-masses across even short interstellar distances you could build multiple Dyson spheres instead. And if they're not cannibalizing the stars themselves then you're talking about bringing in material from hundreds, maybe thousands of other systems.

>already violating Occam's Razor

Except we're not. As a rule Occam's Razor isn't violated, there's just forces you haven't considered in play. You don't see a skyscraper and say "that's not a natural phenomena, so there's no point in thinking about the social and engineering considerations that shape it." That would be silly. Sure, the most likely explanation is a as-yet not grasped natural phenomena. But barring that, the next most likely explanation in an engineered "structure" build in accordance with sound engineering principles - i.e. something that performs the intended task in a reasonably efficient manner with the resources available.

I quote "structure" because, again, the most likely solution is not a coherent structure, but a swarm of solar satellites - the sort thing we're probably not far from starting to build ourselves. The swarm can then be expanded organically to meet rising energy demand until a significant fraction of the sun's output is captured. If instead statites with their tight mass constraints are used, then you can ignore orbital mechanics and intercept up to 100% of the sun's output.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[mr_mischief]

Sound engineering principles follow improvements in materials, logistical support, and manufacturing techniques. If someone finds a lot of material around a dim star near a much brighter star with little material and they have the means to transport it from one system to the other, it's a possibility. Perhaps they have something like a working Alcubierre drive that allows rapid transport among nearby compact solar systems. Maybe they're collecting interstellar dust and debris and moving it inward into systems.

Also, perhaps this alien engineering includes fabricating matter from energy. Perhaps they have enough energy, physics, and engineering to start harvesting enough energy to create much of the matter they need in a solar system that has a high-output star, in order to capture yet more energy.

All of these things are hinted at by our current understanding of physics. If a society could master them, it may be a geometric improvement in capabilities like the computer or the internal combustion engine rather than taking a species just along a slightly faster linear path.

Re:Swarm, not sphere.

[Immerman]

Sure, an Alcubierre drive could conceivably transport planets, perhaps even whole stars, though their gravitational field might provide some challenges. (And if you could transport stars, it might make more sense to build the drive around your home star so you could cruise the universe with power source in tow). Of course the same theories on which an Alcubierre drive are built also state that any faster-than-light drive will also operate as a time machine, which makes them a little implausible. It would also probably require more energy than you'd get from total mass-energy conversion of the star you're moving - as I recall even a small spaceship-sized bubble using all the tricks we've thought of (including pushing many limits to the point that plank-scale effects may make it impossible) requires around a Jupiter-mass worth of energy

As for interstellar dust - there's just not enough to be useful - you would ave to sweep many cubic lightyears of space to collect enough material to make even one puny Earth-sized planet. Consider that our entire asteroid belt, the densest non-planetary distribution of mass in the solar system, masses only about 5% as much as the Moon. Even if by some astounding twist our Oort cloud contains half the total mass of our solar system, you're still talking about having to sweep over 30 cubic lightyears to collect it - and in reality our best estimates put the mass of the Oort cloud at around 5-80 Earth-masses, not even a rounding error compared to the mass of the sun.

As for using energy to matter conversion - no chance. Our sun converts roughly 4 billion kg of mass into about 4x10^26 J every second - so if we already had a 100% efficient dyson sphere and energy->mass converter we could reverse that and produce 4billion kg of matter every second, or 1.26*10^17 kg/year. Spread that across 4x10^31 square meters and you're getting about 3*10^-15 kg per year per square meter - it's going to take you a billion years to generate just 1 milligram per square meter worth of material. And if you had some other power source that could generate power fast enough to be useful for that endeavor, you probably wouldn't have any use for a Dyson sphere in the first place.

A binary star system is probably the best bet - but you wouldn't be transporting the mass around the second star - there's just not enough to be useful, you'd have cannibalize the entire star, or at least a sizable fraction of it. The rest of the mass in the system is unlikely to be more that a small fraction of a percent of the stellar mass. And we're still talking about probably transporting it over at least a sizable fraction of a light year. Plus the difficulties of extracting that mass from its insanely deep gravitational well, which would likely require energy on the scale of a harnessed star to do in a timely fashion, plus some ridiculous technology to not be melted or crushed while "mining" the star

Meanwhile, they could have instead just harvested just a percent or two of the planetary mass already present in their home system to build solar statites in a tight constellation around their star to accomplish the same thing, except for the part where they blocking out the view of the stars from their home planet with a massively inefficient solar array. No magic speculative technology required, just a project almost within reach of even our own technology.

Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

It's important to note that the actual scientists studying the star aren't the ones screaming "ALIENS!" - that's the journalists who misreport and distort things to make them "sell better".

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

Slate have lifted the piece from the Daily Mail. Count yourself lucky it doesn't reference kTrash, people on benefits and immigration, or what the researchers' houses are worth.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[quantaman]

It's important to note that the actual scientists studying the star aren't the ones screaming "ALIENS!" - that's the journalists who misreport and distort things to make them "sell better".

Actually these are the actual scientists studying the star, they aren't screaming aliens but they do seem to be saying something like "we can't figure out how to model this with any natural phenomena so lets see if non-natural hypothesis fit".

FTA:

When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
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’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
[...]
Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know who Phil Plait (author of the article) is? Hint, he's a scientist. That said, even he says it's probably not aliens.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not supposed to RTFA, you're just supposed to thump it while you tell people what to do!

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you even know who Phil Plait (author of the article) is? Hint, he's a scientist.

He's only an astronomer. Real scientists are theoretical physicists.

Re: Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

It is surprising no one is suggesting the possibility of the star being a variable star like a Cepheid variable.

JN

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

journalists who misreport and distort things to make them "sell better".

It does make for Betteridge headlines.

Re: Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Applehu Akbar]

Cepheids would be in one of the early filters for the Kepler mission itself.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Anonymous Coward]

"Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish"

I'm set to publish an alternative theory that life in the universe occurs only on earth, because all of creation was focused here on making Natalie Portman, who is the culmination of all nature's efforts to create perfection. That doesn't mean that the peer reviewers are going to take me seriously. That's why we have peer review. "Set to publish" means about as much as Twilight erotica: absolutely nothing. "Published in a respected, peer-reviewed journal" means something.

Re: Journalists doing all of the speculating

[ngc5194]

Cepheids (and other variables) have well known and well studied light curves (luminosity as a function of time). This star's light curve shows no resemblance to any type of pulsating variable star. It's not a Cepeid. It's also not an RR Lyrae, RV Tauri, or Mira type variable star. So, it's not surprising that nobody has suggested this is a Cepheid.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Alypius]

I was published in a respected, peer-reviewed Natalie Portman erotic fan-fic journal!

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[HiThere]

Well, the description in the summary doesn't model a reasonable way to build a Dyson Sphere...and takes the name much too literally. You need to build it in a way that will be dynamically stable, so forget huge sheets of material. What you need are flexible rings that can be loosely joined in orbit. (Remember, the RingWorld is Unstable, so you don't want a rigid ring, and not a solid one. And Dyson Spheres are worse.)

So what you need to think of is huge strings of spaghetti in orbit, not long enough to reach 1/3 of the way around the sun, but loosely joined (probably magnetic coupling) to other strands so the whole thing is flexible. Even so this process will only allow you to build a belt around the star. So the next step is to build a belt at a different angle of rotation and a different distance from the star. And you build this in pieces, as you need living room (or energy). You maintain every piece of it in orbit, unless you want to detach a part of it and send it climbing into interstellar space. That part will need to be powered against gravity, so it might be best to have it climb directly up from one of the suns poles...and possibly to start it a bit far out, say Mars or Jupiter orbit equivalence. It could be an electrical catapult with both sending and receiving capabilities. This would let you catch harvested Oort cloud material for use in extending the system...or possibly even chunks from a minor free planet.

Remember, you can't build a Dyson Sphere with only the material in one solar system. You can't even build a RingWorld.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[mark-t]

The notion that complex life in the universe occurs only on earth is not actually that far fetched.... to be certain, it is the only planet that we definitely know that such life exists, and the existence of such life elsewhere, however appealing or likely it may seem, given the size of the universe, is not actually proven or even necessarily particularly likely, since we don't actually know what the real odds are that such life would develop in the first place.

We need a sample size of more than one planet with such life to even *BEGIN* to estimate what the actual odds of it evolving might actually be. Doing anything else has no mathematical or scientific validity.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[meadow]

I'm wondering if any of the new extremely-large telescopes being planned/built will be able to get a sufficiently detailed image of the star to determine what is happening?

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[Mal-2]

What about something that doesn't surround a star but instead orbits in the same manner as a planet -- yet still has a great deal more surface area than a planet. Say, an Orbital. I haven't done the math, but Banks said this took the material of a single planet, not the material of multiple star systems.

Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating

[HiThere]

You can do better with a topopolis, but neither would give you the results being investigated. (Actually, what I was proposing was a variation on a topopolis modified to give the results being investigated. You can must place the spaghetti strands in orbit, and they aren't long enough to encircle the star (probably only a few tens of miles per strand. So you can stack them parallel in orbit and use magnetic couplers to hold them in parallel. You'll need spacers because the strands (which are only a mile or two in diameter) rotate to provide gravity. I think you could also use similar coupler to link adjoining strands so that you could have sections that don't rotate and sections that are open to vacuum. Which means you need contact free linkages, therefore magnetic bearings.

FWIW, the Orbital you mentioned doesn't sound safe to me, as any mechanical failure could destroy the entire habitat. Even my proposed magnetic bearings are a bit dubious, and perhaps it would be better to use strands of strong line as well as the frictionless bearings, so that if there was a failure the lines could break and leave the *SECTION* of the habitat unharmed. (It's so designed that nothing that damages one strand would render the other strands unstable...but you might need to avoid ... call it chaff radiating from the accident.)

One of the real benefits of the topopolis design is that not only can it be built in small pieces, but each piece is essentially independent of the other pieces modular orbital position. (You still need to carefully avoid collisions.) Of course this does mean that life support must be distributed into each section independently, but that's an advantage as it allows for vacuum manufacturing to happen in some sections, and zero-g manufacturing to happen in some sections, and still other sections to combine the two, or have high-g. Movement from one section to another linearly is relatively simple via a break-away tube (i.e., in case of accident it easily breaks away at one end). Movement at right angles to the orbit needs to be done via two zero-g (non-rotating) sections which can link adjacent strands. So it's slower and more circuitous.

But you can make a topopolis as large as you wish. If you have fusion power you could even have an electric elevator to the stars...well, half way. But that would require a non-attached section that was not in any kind of contact to the rest of the system....except, perhaps, being within a catapult distance (throwing and catching).

There's probably lots of other approaches that would work, but I am dubious about all large and simply connected structures. There is too much chance that one mechanical disaster could destroy the whole thing. (Even planets have that problem, see "Dinosaur Killer", but planets weren't designed as habitats.)

History channel special coming soon...

[Anonymous Coward]

"proof" of aliens

Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't this have been built already and the people (probably) already dead?

Re:Given Distance

[HappyHead]

Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now. Of course, it's just as possible that we're seeing the star in question being blocked off by comets, clouds of dark matter, or other random space debris.

Re:Given Distance

[PPH]

Given the level of technology (and investment) needed to build a Dyson sphere, I would guess that it would be designed to last for quite some time. So the descendants of the builders are probably still alive and using it.

It probably has been repainted a few times. Some Bondo in the meteorite dents, etc.

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now. Of course, it's just as possible that we're seeing the star in question being blocked off by comets, clouds of dark matter, or other random space debris.

Dark matter doesn't interact visibily with light or matter. Comets or "random space debris" will not cause consistent 20% dimming.

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

We're within a few generations of eternal biological life ourselves, why would death be a concern for a civilisation that can build Dyson spheres.

Re:Given Distance

[sims 2]

Doesn't matter the farther out we look the farther we see into the past.

The one of the farthest known galaxies is EGSY8p7 what we see of it today happened 13.2 billion years ago. When you look up at the sky you are looking into the past.

KIC 8462852 however is only 1,500 light years away.
You might be able to complete a dyson sphere in that time frame. But I don't know the timescale you would have to be working on for such a project to be feasible.

Re:Given Distance

[HappyHead]

Dark matter doesn't interact visibily with light or matter. Comets or "random space debris" will not cause consistent 20% dimming.

And yet it's still equally likely, since as the original article, and several posters have pointed out, the whole "it was aliens! Dyson sphere!" thing would be causing large emissions in the IR area, which are not present.

Also, the term "dark matter" is not just applied to exotic invisible space matter, but also to clouds of gas and dust that are just too cold to emit any light (hence, dark). Random space debris in large enough concentrations, oort cloud distortions from another star (the small red dwarf about 130 billion km out that the article mentions) are again a possible cause.

The problems with the majority of these ideas (including the dyson sphere/swarm/...) is that most of them would be showing additional signs like glowing brightly in IR, which is just not present.

Also, the dimming is not a consistent 20% - it's changing frequently, and not in a smooth or repeating pattern. (which would suggest a planet or other orbital body) If anything, what makes it interesting is that it's not consistent, but it keeps happening.

Re:Given Distance

[Electricity Likes Me]

"dark matter" is never used in astronomical terms these days to refer to cold objects. They're called "cold" for that reason.

Re:Given Distance

[Pallas Athena]

That is certainly possible - no one will ever be able to tell what is happening > at that distance. Yet, why do you think it is 'more than likely'? 1500 years is not that long. 1500 years ago, the Western Roman Empire collapsed. Human history goes back a lot further. And plenty of artifacts that those Romans, Greeks, Egyptians and lots of others build around or before that time still exist. And, at this moment, we are still alive too...

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.

We have organisms on earth which are about 80,000 years old.

The lifespan of beings about 454 parsecs away that are presumed to build structures on the scale of a solar system is pure guessing.

Re:Given Distance

[pla]

Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.

1500 years ago on Earth, the "real" King Arthur reigned; Clovis beat the Visigoths at Vouille; Constantinople saw the Hagia Sophia wrapped up; and Justinian ruled the Byzantine empire.

Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died out by now? Or even that such a species hasn't effectively conquered death, potentially allowing for individual members of it to remain alive today?

Re:Given Distance

[Immerman]

That's the beautiful thing about Dysons spheres, especially the original "cloud of orbital solar panels" version - the infrastructure for building the very first panel is a challenge, after that you just keep adding more to incrementally increase the power output as needed until you're absorbing a large percentage of the star's total output. At that point things become a little tricker, but having a sizable fraction of the star's total power at your command probably makes the consolidation phase far more tractable...

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since it's 1500 light years away, that means what we're seeing is from 1500 years ago. Yes, more than likely, if there was anyone alive at that location when what we're seeing happened, they're probably dead by now.

Matroska Brains should have a life expectancy measured in the hundreds of billions to trillions of years.

Assuming the construction of such a thing was successful the Matroska Brain should still be alive and well. Although perhaps not whatever beings created the thing.

There's also the potential issue of if/when the host star goes nova, as making a Matroska Brain or Dyson Shell frist-try that is capable of relocating between stars would be that much more of a monumental engineering undertaking (even compared to building the thing in the first place)

But obviously from our point of view we have no way to tell until the light from such events reaches us, aka when it eventually happens in the future.

PS you really should specify the point-in-space you are taking your time measurement from to avoid confusion. You've mixed "here" and "there" terms in the same sentence yet clearly tried to make the (obvious) point you are ignoring our point-in-space and only talking about their point-in-space (which is pretty strange since their point in space doesn't matter much to us at all, so why not just use our point in space and reference point, so your entire statement could be boiled down into the word "now" instead?)

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died out by now? Or even that such a species hasn't effectively conquered death, potentially allowing for individual members of it to remain alive today?

In fact, instead of building a dyson sphere, the more likely assumption in that direction would be to build a matroska brain, in which case the brain itself is already immortal (assuming an AI and that it is conscious), and at the very least copies of the creators minds are probably stored within it. If that storage is possible to use with a simulation, those minds would also be alive and immortal.

If one is already OK with the idea of "building something stupidly mindbogglingly huge and complex", it shouldn't be much more of a leap to "building something stupidly mindbogglingly huge and complex - with computers in it" ;)
The former bit required for both is (to us) the harder part. We're pretty good at stuffing computers in things already, so at least to my human brain it seems like an obvious way to go.

Of course now we are adding in the assumptions of one or more strong AI's running in the matroska brain to be able to label it as immortal.
Plus the assumption that mind uploading and simulation is a possible thing.

So far as the construction of a dyson sphere or matroska brain in hardware however, most of the fundamental engineering how to do so was solved nearly 50 years ago.

Computers that would scale and interoperate at that level seems like it should be very possible, but we haven't really engineered how to go about it yet.

AI, mind uploading, and mind simulation are all completely untouched problems so far as humanity is concerned, and the last two have just as much circumstantial evidence that they are impossible as there is they are possible. Continuity of consciousness and all that.
Even AI is only possible in the theoretical sense, in that there is no evidence to show it can't be done. Until such evidence crops up, or until we actually make one, we still can't say either way if it's possible in an engineering sense.

Re:Given Distance

[Triklyn]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

pando laughs at your foolish preconception of living and life-span.

Re:Given Distance

[Coren22]

I would hardly call the light curves in TFA consistent. Erratic, sure, consistent, no, it is 15% one day, 20% with fuzzy the next with the changes even being odd as well. This is a very weird object.

Re: Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

Or a black body...

Re:Given Distance

[Anonymous Coward]

If they can construct things like this than you can be sure there are NO comets, meteorites or asteroids in that solar system that could in any way or form threaten the Dyson Sphere.

"Overwhelmingly Unlikely"

[RumGunner]

...but still fun to wildly speculate about.

The question on everybody's mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care about this. I just need to know if it will still vacuum efficiently.

Re:The question on everybody's mind...

[no1nose]

They never lose suction.

I was wondering if it would be unbearably hot inside on of these hypothetical spheres. How would the heat dissipate?

Re:The question on everybody's mind...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spaceballs could very well be causing these fluctuations..

Re:The question on everybody's mind...

[Dunbal]

How would the heat dissipate?

You turn it into other things like kinetic energy, electricity, etc. Of course it all wants to go back to heat eventually, which is why in theory Dyson spheres still emit infrared. Which you allow to bleed off into space. But not before making all that energy work for you first. Kind of like a dam. You do realize that a dam doesn't completely block a river, right? Unless of course you want the river to flow over and around your dam...

I'm not saying its Aliens

[Archangel Michael]

... But its Aliens!

-Filed under "we want to believe in aliens so bad, we're willing to entertain that idea even without any credible evidence"

Re:I'm not saying its Aliens

[Anonymous Coward]

>we want to believe in aliens so bad, we're willing to entertain that idea even without any credible evidence
just like the nonexistence of God

Re:I'm not saying its Aliens

[Archangel Michael]

I have found that Atheists have almost (not 100% but close) universal belief in Aliens.

Re:I'm not saying its Aliens

[dave420]

If you say that's the case, it must be! It's not as if you are frequently wrong or anything, so everyone should just listen to what you say and accept it as perfect fact.

Sure...

[Anonymous Coward]

it could be caused by a Dyson-Sphere. Or an unstable Star. Or the Vogons building their Highway....

Meanwhile, in the real world, STOP SMOKING ADDERALL!

Oh dear god.....

[Lumpy]

How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?

Nahh, let's go with a civilization that has harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Brown dwarves really aren't that much larger in volume than Jupiter is. maybe that's why.
 
Just putting it out there.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....

Has anyone done the math on this? Just how much rock would we need to mine to make the metal to build a Dyson sphere in the Goldilocks zone of, say, our own star?

I suspect we'd need to strip an impractical number of stars, which means a civilization would require energy->matter conversion technology to pull it off.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[dmgxmichael]

Jupiter seems to be at a curious point between being a planet and a star. Planets don't get much bigger, by volume, than Jupiter - they just start getting denser and denser until nuclear fusion begins. A brown dwarf an order of magnitude more massive than Jupiter would still be roughly the same size - so no, it's not a brown dwarf. Stars outright can be considerably smaller than the sun.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[blue9steel]

Nahh, let's go with a civilization that has harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....

If you have a normal amount of planetary material there is no need to harvest materials from other solar systems in order to build a dyson sphere. That would be a far more monumental task.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[willworkforbeer]

harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....

Has anyone done the math on this? Just how much rock would we need to mine to make the metal to build a Dyson sphere

Based on my analysis of Press Release Promise Units mixed into an alloy with Wild Speculation Hype, about a kilogram of carbon nanotubes.
The formula is:
- Carbon nanotubes
- something something
- Dyson Sphere
- profit

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

A larger brown dwarf twin would still be visible to the telescopes, since they still emit infrared light, and none was found. Additionally, the dimming of the star from a companion star would follow a regular, repeating pattern, which the dimming seen here does not follow. And again, the actual scientists are not the ones yelling ALIENS! - that's the reporters who deliberately distort things to sensationalize them. The only aliens here are the clickbait that obscures the actual interesting sciency stuff.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to the Wikipedia page on the subject. The math has been done and even rough estimates say that our solar system contains only about 1/100th of the material necessary to construct a full Dyson Sphere (ignoring the many other problems with such a construct - drift of the sphere wrt the star, no known material strong enough to withstand the compressive forces, etc).

Basically, constructing a full sphere would require harvesting about 100 solar systems, hauling all that material back to a single star, creating materials unlike anything we know of and marshaling a construction force beyond imagining... The heat signature of the harvesting, hauling and construction would dwarf any star (and hence be easily detectable).

But sure, lets have "fun" and speculate about things that simply could not be just so as to pollute the waters with pseudo science until no one can discern the difference between real science and malarkey.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not an physicist but it seems like building an object to trap the entirety of the energy escaping a star would significantly change the position of the Goldilocks zone.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[angel'o'sphere]

You are bad in math, are you? Or only bad in estimations?

If we gather all material of our solar system I doubt we would be able to make a reasonable sized Dyson Sphere which is a single atom thick.

With reasonable sized I mean: slightly larger than earth orbit. Obviously we want a larger one, and the surface squales with the square of the radius. Theat means if we want to include Mars into the sphere (60% farer away) we need ~40% more material.

A reasonable distance would likely be beyond Saturn ...

Keep in mind: you need rocky stuff, and Jupiter e.g. and all planets behind him are simply gas (or frozen gas with very little metal or rock)

Re:Oh dear god.....

[pz]

How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?

The signal is highly aperiodic (read the article), so a brown dwarf won't be a good explanation. I'd expect a protoplanetary disk would be a more reasonable explanation than a brown dwarf, but then there's the problem with the missing IR. It could be a trinary system with lots of occlusions from our perspective (which would mean that the stars would all be very close together). This star is just ... odd, no matter what the explanation ends up being.

What we need is a set of extra-terrestrial telescopes flying in precise formation so that we can do 100,000 km baseline interferometry and get the sort of resolution to see detail like that.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

That is all opinion and no substance, no math. Why would we want one at any size beyond the minimum. This is an engineering problem. Not an emotional one. Using emotional thoughts and words like "want", "I doubt", or "reasonable sized" with nothing more than desire behind them is not math; is not engineering; is not valid.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[gstoddart]

Hmmm ... moving huge quantities of material from your own solar system is an absolutely enormous scale.

How much energy and engineering is going to be required to move the stuff from another entire solar system? I believe when GP says "That would be a far more monumental task", it's both an understatement and an indication of just how crazy it would be.

Honestly, since the math for building a Dyson sphere is well and truly beyond me ... if you can go to another solar system and bring back the stuff you need to build a Dyson sphere, do you need a Dyson sphere in the first place?

It just seems like the energies involved in moving around that much matter means you might be able to look at other solutions.

Also, I assume you want your Dyson sphere to be at the radius your original planet was at. Why would we include Mars in it? Don't we want it at the same distance from the sun as we are now? No more no less?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[blue9steel]

You are bad in math, are you? Or only bad in estimations?

The calculations have already been done, here is a quote from wikipedia "estimates that there is 1.82×1026 kg of easily usable building material in the Solar System, enough for a 1-AU shell with a mass of 600 kg/m2—about 8–20 cm thick on average, depending on the density of the material." Of course there are some debates as to whether that is sufficiently thick. Regardless of thickness there are a variety of design problems with the solid shell version and that's not what Dyson was actually proposing. A Dyson swarm or Niven ring would be much more practical.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[CrimsonAvenger]

What he said.

From TFA, we're talking something that occults 20% of the visible area of the star in question. That something would have to ~40% of the diameter of the star in question to do that. So, for a Sol-sized star, we're talking 300,000km in diameter.

No, we're not going to be finding any natural objects that size that aren't emitting light themselves.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Phurd Phlegm]

If we gather all material of our solar system I doubt we would be able to make a reasonable sized Dyson Sphere which is a single atom thick.

I didn't know atoms were so big. As a back-of-envelope thing, I worked out the area of a sphere around one A.U. in radius. It's around 108686793600000000 square miles (I live in the U.S., so sue me). The volume of the earth, assuming a radius of 4000 miles, is around 268083199987 cubic miles. Now, if we divide that by the area, we get a thickness of around 0.15 inch. And that's just using the material making up the earth.

Of course, maybe I dropped a zero or something somewhere.
</blockquote>

Re:Oh dear god.....

[angel'o'sphere]

Also, I assume you want your Dyson sphere to be at the radius your original planet was at. Why would we include Mars in it? Don't we want it at the same distance from the sun as we are now? No more no less?

To make Mars habitable ofc.

With a dyson sphere you gather basically all energy output of the sun.

You can direct easy energy for warming Mars and any other big enough rock to live on.

That is one of the points of a dyson sphere.

Actually except for making electricity you can not really use that energy for anything ... for flying around in the solar system you still need ejection mass or solar sails.

The math is easy. You define the distance of the sphere, lets call the outer diameter R, then we have a thickness, lets assume you want a one yard thick sphere (which makes no sense) then the inner diameter is r = R - 1yard.

We calculate the volume of the sphere inside R and substract the volume of the sphere with size r.

So V=2/3 * pi * R^3 and v=2/3*pi*r^3

For R we take 300million miles ;D and for r one yard less, now we only need a pocket calculator to calc V and v and V - v is the volume of a 1yard thick shell surrounding the whole solar system in 300 million miles distance.

No way in freezing hell, regardless what that wiki article some one is talking about claims, we have nearly a percent of that mass in our solar system.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[ChromaticDragon]

The mass of a Dyson Sphere of carbon with a radius equal to the orbit of Ceres that is 1 millimeter thick turns out to be...

drumroll...

slightly less than the mass of Earth.

And that's using the density of solid carbon. You could probably get a sphere out past Saturn's radius switching to a fancy aerogel or something.

And with "all material of our solar system" at "one atom thick"...

With that we'd get a Dyson sphere with radius a third the way to Alpha Centauri.

Ummm... about that remark of estimatory prowess...

Re:Oh dear god.....

[sinij]

Why wouldn't they just harvest the star for metals?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Immerman]

Why would you make it so big? Make it just slightly larger than the sun itself (or as close as the thermal stresses and your material science will allow) , and leave a mostly empty gap in the ecliptic plane. Then you capture most of the total solar output with a minimum of material, while letting sunlight continue to bathe the planets and orbital habitat.

A million-mile radius sphere (about twice the size of the sun ) would have over 100,000x less surface area than an Earth-orbit sized one, and be absorbing over 13MW/m^2 instead of the piddling 1.5kW/m^2 available at Earth's orbit.

Also your math is off - Mars' orbit is 52% further larger (1.52x), meaning it would have 2.31x the surface area, or 131% more.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless it's a group of them all rotating around occasionally at similar relative points at the same time.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[gstoddart]

Also, I assume you want your Dyson sphere to be at the radius your original planet was at. Why would we include Mars in it? Don't we want it at the same distance from the sun as we are now? No more no less?

To make Mars habitable ofc.

Hmmm ... perhaps you and I have different notions of a Dyson sphere.

In my scenario, you denude the solar system for building materials. There is no planet inside of Earth's orbit, and chances anything rocky outside of Earth has been ground up as well. And while you're at it, Earth gets ground up too. You and up with a sphere 1AU in diameter, so that the amount of sunlight reaching the inside surface of that sphere is the same as reaches Earth, thereby assuring you can still grow crops. It's kind of a purpose built bubble you now call home.

You sure as hell don't end up with a bunch of planets orbiting inside of a sphere. You don't warm up Mars. You don't have other big rocks big enough to live on.

There is no solar system, there are no planets ... you rip the entire solar system apart (except the sun of course), and re-purpose the raw materials to make your sphere. You live on the inside of the sphere.

Am I missing something in the definition of Dyson sphere? Because a shell in which all of your planets orbit isn't anywhere near lining up with my understanding of one.

A shell whose material came from every rock in your solar system is what you have. It's a sand and gravel pit on the scale of a solar system.

In this scenario, nobody gives a crap about the climate of Mars, because there simply is no Mars left to give a crap about.

I've never though it was a plausible thing. But I've always understood you no longer have the things which used to be your solar system by the time you're done.

So, if you chew up the entire solar system, is there enough mass then? Because that's how I understand it.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[ngc5194]

... and if the star had one significantly sized periodic dip in it's luminosity, that would be a plausible explanation. However, that's not what we see. We see a lot of different sized dips with no apparent periodicity so far. It's not one brown dwarf. Do you honestly think that professional astronomers wouldn't have considered this possibility before publishing their findings?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Spottywot]

I'm not an physicist but it seems like building an object to trap the entirety of the energy escaping a star would significantly change the position of the Goldilocks zone.

Interesting point, could be a double whammy, you could build a partial sphere and then terraform Venus, getting lots of power and a new planet to fuck up at the same time.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[thoromyr]

For simplicity, lets go with the numbers already suggested. If we have 1/100th in our solar system then it would be about one solar mass (our sun comprises about 99% of the solar system's mass). So on principle of mass we could raid our sun for the matter to build a dyson sphere, but doing so would obviously rob us of our sun.

At the same time, not all matter is equivalent. Most matter is hydrogen, but I would be more impressed by a civilization that could build a dyson sphere out of hydrogen rather than one that had to resort to non-gaseous elements...

Re:Oh dear god.....

[meta-monkey]

Because the star isn't made of metal? It's made of hydrogen and helium. At least until it's dying and the helium starts fusing into heavier elements.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you make those calculations under the assumption that we want to live inside it (and grow crops and such) and thus we need such a size sphere to adequately manage the excess heat from the sun. Is that correct?

What if we artificially moved excess heat to the outside of the sphere with heat exchangers and radiators?

What if we instead say that the dyson sphere is only used for power production and/or factory purposes? No need for habitable conditions means you could run the whole thing a lot hotter, and perhaps a lot smaller. Would this make it more feasible? Or is there a flaw in my thinking somewhere?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[rahvin112]

The paper discusses the natural solutions that are possible. Though the more interesting solutions are the non-natural solutions. If you are willing to throw intelligence into the equation this could be any number of things from massive solar collectors or other large collections of produced objects down to dyson spheres under construction. Certainly an interesting finding nonetheless.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[jandrese]

It's not a Dyson sphere, but Larry Niven speculated that you could build a somewhat plausible Ringworld using just the mass of Jupiter. It requires a material with more tensile strength than we can build today, but not excessively so. The mass conversion of Jupiter into said material is an exercise left up to the reader.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[tobiasly]

But sure, lets have "fun" and speculate about things that simply could not be just so as to pollute the waters with pseudo science until no one can discern the difference between real science and malarkey.

If, 1000 years ago, you had described an Internet-based smartphone or a manned moon mission or quantum teleportation to someone, it would have sounded just as batshit crazy to them as the scenario you describe sounds to us. Part of the fun of trying to imagine a civilization a million years more advanced than humans is that our minds can barely even grasp the concepts, much less how they'd be carried out.

Think of how much technological progress humans have made in the past 100 years. Where will we be 1,000,000 years from now? (Well, we probably will have destroyed the planet and wiped ourselves out, but still...)

Re:Oh dear god.....

[amicusNYCL]

How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?

You're suggesting that it's "plausible" that Kepler would observe this star over a 4 year span for 30 minutes per day and notice irregular dimming up to 22% while somehow not noticing that there is a large brown dwarf sitting next to it?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh well, is that all you have to do? Easy peasy!

All you have to do is to extract from a huge gravity well, gigatons of matter. Matter that is in plasma form and will melt any physical object you can conceive, so fields will have to be used. Except the star has it's own fields and they are notably powerful and wide-ranging, even on a very mild-mannered star like Sol.

But let's say you have solved all that. Most stars have very low levels of metals in their atmosphere, for huge, vast oceans of time. The only time they get concentrated metal content is right near the end of their useful fusion lives when they become extremely unstable and dangerous. Or wait until that's all over and they are white dwarfs or neutron stars. By then you'll find that field dipping won't work at all and you have to use physical objects to mine the star, unless you can deploy and control microscopic black holes. Any physical objects would have to be able to resist the forces of degenerate matter and most likely the only things that could do that is other degenerate matter.

At this point you've far exceeded even science fiction and are firmly in the realm of science fantasy. Dragons, anyone?

Re:Oh dear god.....

[khallow]

The math has been done and even rough estimates say that our solar system contains only about 1/100th of the material necessary to construct a full Dyson Sphere (ignoring the many other problems with such a construct - drift of the sphere wrt the star, no known material strong enough to withstand the compressive forces, etc).

Or we could use some of the mass of Mercury to build a cloud of orbiting solar power generators or mirrors for many orders of magnitude less mass. It's still a Dyson sphere (in fact of the form that Freeman Dyson original proposed!).

Re:Oh dear god.....

[delt0r]

Try reading at least the summary. It even points out that it is not likely. But also your suggestion is *worse* since it would be periodic. It is not.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[delt0r]

Yes of course we have done the math on this. Do you really think a bunch of /. think that laterly that half a century of astronomers didn't think of it? On top of that we actually do sit down and run the numbers, rather than suggested lame things repeatedly that are 100 and thousands of orders of magnitude out of the ballpark.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[delt0r]

Niven ring is as bad as a solid sphere. It is not stable and serves no practical purpose other than bad scifi stories. If your going to go for big rings out of magic material, the orbitals of the culture universe (Iain Banks) make the most sense.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Lumpy]

Sounds like a plan, you first.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Dyson never actually said it would have to be a fully enclosed sphere. The TNG Relics notion of an opaque Dyson Sphere is a sci-fi flight of fancy.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[blue9steel]

Niven ring is as bad as a solid sphere. It is not stable and serves no practical purpose other than bad scifi stories.

Given some for adjustment it should be maintainable and the ability to spin it solves the whole gravity issue. Since it's smaller it also means there is enough material to make it much thicker which solves some of the stress issues. Obviously any of these objects are still far beyond our technological level, with the exception of something like the Dyson swarm which is really more a collection of objects.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[delt0r]

It is still unstable. Spinning or not. It will fall "sideways" into the star.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[sinij]

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C . Clarke

Re:Oh dear god.....

[sinij]

Very good point for why mining a smaller star like Sun to build a Dyson sphere might not work out, but there are other types of more massive stars.

I think star's gravity well would be much bigger problem than anything else.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[blue9steel]

Yes, due to being a solid object it's not actually in "orbit" so you would need some form of attitude control. This could probably be managed with adjustable solar sails along the rim to keep it centered and some thrusters to keep it balanced. I have no idea if the fuel requirements for that are practical though.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

this is our species biggest problem. we think we already know everything.

Re:Oh dear god.....

[Anonymous Coward]

#1. you wouldn't be capable of living inside this shell. it is purely a powerhouse

#2. you wouldn't place the shell radius where the old livable planet was, you would make the shell's radius the optimum point to get the most power with the least amount of resources to do so. so let's say the material you're working with can "live" and work while being as close to the star as mercury is to the sun, but no further. that's the radius where you'd place the shell. that means you need less material, and even with holes in the shell, you still get a decent amount of solar radiation to work with due to being closer to the source

Re:Oh dear god.....

[angel'o'sphere]

What would be the point of a Dyson Sphere with 1 AU distance from the sun?

You can not live on the surface of it in the inside ... so you can not plant trees there or make agriculture: there is no gravity! There would not even be an atmosphere.

A idea of a Dyson Sphere is to collect all the energy of the sun ... for what purpose ever.

In your idea the whole thing would heat up so quick that nothing would live there anyway. Or where do you think the solar energy is going to escape to?

The only way to live inside on the inner surface would be to rotate it and use the zentrifugal force.

That would mean only a `small stripe along the equator would have sufficient "gravity".

Whether you remove the inner planets is likely a matter of taste (and resources needed)

If there was enough resources I would make the Sphere somewhere between Neptun and Planet Pluto.

However as long as we are not able to use the suns energy for anything useful, like a wormhole or something, a Dyson Sphere is pretty pointless imho.

It would make more sense to build "culture" like super habitats.

Wild Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

It is Phil Plait's ego bouncing off of pools of water on Mars.

or silly boring mainstream view might be correct

[rubycodez]

This star believed to have large amounts of dust remains of broken up comets orbiting it with high eccentricity (very elliptical as opposed to more circular). Yawn.

The alternative is so much more exciting, provocative, brain invigorating: "Now I'm not saying it was mega-engineering by aliens, BUT IT WAS MEGA..."

We are local creatures with local knowledge

[fyngyrz]

We know almost nothing about nature anywhere outside the solar system. We have been making assumptions as best we can with the data we have, but the fact is all of our real experience is local and we just don't know what might be going on that far away.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally! Someone says the truth. Cosmology is an interesting field. You can make up any damned theory you want about how the cosmos works without any real empirical evidence other than some indirect observation or observation from only one very miniscule vantage point.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[wwalker]

This can be said about pretty much any scientific field — we make assumptions based on observations. What's "real experience"? You can't touch or see electrons, for example, and yet we know a lot about what's going on with them. It's just that there are limited types of observations that we can make about distant stars, and not a whole lot of experiments that we can set up, but that doesn't mean that anything we learn about them is less "real" or valid. Look at neutrinos. They are everywhere, can't be any more "local" than that. And yet we probably know even less about them than about distant stars, simply because neutrinos just don't interact with the rest of the world that much (from what I remember from school). So "locality" of the observed object or event doesn't really mean much from scientific point of view.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Austerity Empowers]

So you're saying that guessing about some alien civilization we can't prove exists, building a fabulously and probably impossibly expensive structure around a star we can't see that well might be jumping to conclusions?

Dyson Denier.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[MouseR]

The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system. That's beside any issue regarding building this structure which wouldn't collapse on itself.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[fyngyrz]

This can be said about pretty much any scientific field

No, it really can't. If there's a shadow of a tree on a building from a street lamp, I can look between the lamp and the building and locate the tree in a perfectly empirical, down-to-earth (ha!) manner, as well as knowing very well that the light is coming from the lamp.

If there's a little spinning object with an irregular topology out there between us and this star, we can't tell. We can't tell if it's a star at all -- all we can do is look at the spectrum and say, well, it looks like a star. All we get locally is the result of the occlusion, or whatever is actually causing the variation of intensity, which might just be a stellar process we've not run into previously. So we have to work with the idea of "what do we think might cause that", which may, or may not, give us the correct answer. Hence the speculation about Dyson spheres or other intervening objects. Low probability? Sure. But reasonable to consider? Certainly. One thing such consideration may do is give us reason to rule it out, which is also valuable. Particularly in the light (ha!) of information we can't otherwise explain as meeting known expectations based on previous observations. Process of elimination is a great tool.

Don't get me wrong - I am a huge admirer of science, and am truly impressed by the deductive reasoning that comes into play, but that doesn't mean we've always got it right. And I think it's pretty much a given that the further away we are, and the less data we have, and the less we know about everything between us and whatever we're looking at, the less certain our deductions must be.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[davester666]

Here, grab these two power lines and feel some electrons.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Wycliffe]

The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system. That's beside any issue regarding building this structure which wouldn't collapse on itself.

Any civilization capable of building anything close to size of a dyson sphere would not be limited to what's available in a single solar system.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

This is so absolutely wrong I don't even know where to begin. You may have heard about this science called astronomy, where they look at objects outside the solar system all the time.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[NicknameUnavailable]

The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system.

Depends on the thickness.

That's beside any issue regarding building this structure which wouldn't collapse on itself.

Why? Just spin it.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[dryeo]

True, but this is a different stellar system then the solar system. As we have observed stellar systems with up to 7 stars in their system, it is really hard to judge how much material is in this particular system but there could easily be a red dwarf that is currently being disassembled and reassembled.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[khallow]

The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system.

As I note elsewhere, a cloud of solar power satellites or mirrors, say, 1-2 million km out from the Sun's center would suffice both for capturing the Sun's complete output and using far less mass. Mercury would have enough mass to cover this.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[khallow]

Why? Just spin it.

That doesn't work for material near the poles.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[bentcd]

Any civilization capable of building anything close to size of a dyson sphere would not be limited to what's available in a single solar system.

Pretty much by definition.

I don't think most people really grasp how mindboggingly big a Dyson sphere is. I sure as hell don't.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[tehcyder]

Yes, but no one is suggesting that neutrinos are evidence of aliens engaged in vast construction works.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[tehcyder]

Any civilization capable of building anything close to size of a dyson sphere would not be limited to what's available in a single solar system.

Pretty much by definition.

I don't think most people really grasp how mindboggingly big a Dyson sphere is. I sure as hell don't.

What, even compared to the trip down the road to the chemist?

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[delt0r]

Well lets see shall we. We don't have to guess, and from intuition i do think your wrong.

First of all a Dyson sphere is *not* a solid sphere, the original speculation was lots of orbital satellites in a star orbit of sufficient density to significantly occlude the star. Lets assume a total of 50% occlusion maximum. It will be less on average because of the orbits of these power satellites will intersect and overlap from time to time.

Now since we are not a wasteful civilisation we set these things up fairly close to the star. Say 10 million km from the star center. Now the average thickness of a power satellite can in fact be very small, cus its 99% mirrors for example. Lets assume .1mm of material. Which material? Lets assume metal, in this case lets just try pure iron. We can in fact use many different materials. But that can work and gives us an idea of what our solar system could support.

So now the numbers: the total area is pi*1e9^2/2=3.14x10^18 m2. Total volume of iron is 3.14x10^14 m3. This is substantially less that the volume of just earths inner core at 4.27x10^18 m3.

So in short there are many orders of magnitude more material in the solar system than is required for a full Dyson "sphere".

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Wycliffe]

I don't think most people really grasp how mindboggingly big a Dyson sphere is. I sure as hell don't.

According to wikipedia, the interior of a dyson sphere would have 550 million times the surface area of earth. Before getting to that point, it would make a lot more sense to just pull a bunch of planets (like mars) into the same orbit, or better yet, implement some sort of population control before you need that much damn space. If we can never figure out how to break the light barrier, something like this is probably inevitable as most people aren't going to want to board a multigenerational ship but sending a robotic ship on a multigeneration journey to bring back materials would be something that could possibly be done.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Chatsubo]

Then don't build the poles.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[cwsumner]

Here, grab these two power lines and feel some electrons.

That's not the electrons that you feel, it's various third-level side effects.

But the effects are definite enough that you know -something- is there!
Something that you can't see, feel, or taste has just knocked you over, it must be Magic! 8-)

I work with powerful magic every day. This world calls me an engineer, but that doesn't change anything...

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[cwsumner]

Why? Just spin it.

That doesn't work for material near the poles.

I think the theory was that the light pressure from the star would support it.
(But I could be wrong.)

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

You are assuming:
1. All solar systems have the same amount of materials available.
2. Size of the Sphere. Remember the Sphere the size of Earth Orbit will be about 20 cm think with materials available in Solar System. Halving the radius will quadruple the thickness.
3. Thickness required. Remember the main point of Dyson Sphere is energy collection (solar panels) not living space.
4. Known materials. Remember theoretical limit for materials tensile strength is something like billions of billions time stronger than anything we have now.

Re: We are local creatures with local knowledge

[saloomy]

It doesn't work if you think of the sphere as a solid sphere such as a basket ball. It does work if you think of it as a series of pretty wide rings each spinning about itself. That way, all the light of the host star can be absorbed while requiring little interior support. You could do the same around a planet, the international space station doesn't orbit the equator exactly either, because all orbits cause centrifugal pull/angular momentum.

Re: We are local creatures with local knowledge

[Anonymous Coward]

I think people are running with dyson sphere but it may be clusters of satellites in a dyson swarm.

The material to build a dyson sphere is unimaginable, but in a swarm the material might be less dense than paper.

Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge

[beastofburdon]

Hell, we don't even know much at all about our own solar system. Have you ever looked into the coronal heating problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
or the faint young sun problem? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Can't believe Phil Plait

[Anonymous Coward]

He's only in it for the dollars, not the science. He lost his job at Discovery when he unsuccessfully use to push his blog here and never bothered to actually interact with the users.

Just like in the old Bad Astronomy forum, the most anal-retentive moderation I've ever seen in the Internet.

Ringworld shadow squares.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty obvious what this has to be. The Protectors are building a ringworld (aka Niven Ring) and have installed the shadow-squares (or rectangles) first. We're seeing the periodic dimming as they pass in front of the star. When they finish the ring, the star will look constantly slightly dimmer (unless precession) from our angle and the variation will go a way.

Re:Ringworld shadow squares.

[ColdWetDog]

It's pretty obvious what this has to be. The Protectors are building a ringworld (aka Niven Ring) and have installed the shadow-squares (or rectangles) first. We're seeing the periodic dimming as they pass in front of the star. When they finish the ring, the star will look constantly slightly dimmer (unless precession) from our angle and the variation will go a way.

Wrong. It's a Kempler Rosette. The Pierson Puppeteers got there first.

Re:Ringworld shadow squares.

[jfdavis668]

Light sails from a Motie invasion.

Except...

[slashmydots]

Except that it's lots of lightyears away which means it would have been lots of years ago which means....OMG THEY'RE ON THEIR WAY HERE, RUN!

Re:Except...

[Spottywot]

Except that it's lots of lightyears away which means it would have been lots of years ago which means....OMG THEY'RE ON THEIR WAY HERE, RUN!

My first thought was Run? Where to? However it occurred to me that if we're observing them 1500 years ago we still maybe have plenty of time to find somewhere to hide. If they are travelling at 0.5 light speed they are still 750 years away, they are probably only coming around to borrow a cup of sugar in any case.

Re:Except...

[Anonymous Coward]

The funny part is that may be not their first Dyson Sphere and in couple of years we will start noticing more and more stars having strange behaviour before going out as light from them gets to us.

Actually observing the building process we can estimate how fast they are building and how much of stars we see today are already enclosed. for all we know every star future than 1500 light years from us already enclosed.

However I think it is much better to just suck all of the Hydrogen from the star and burn it in controlled Fusion reactors. Rather that try to capture all energy of a star. With reactor you can choose how much energy you need to produce at any point, where you want to produce it, and probably can achieve much better efficiencies in energy extraction. It will probably will be much simple to do than building a Dyson Sphere too.

Therefore, this is not a Dyson Sphere, it is just a work of art, a lighthouse, yet unexplained natural phenomena, just stupid aliens with technology but no imagination (or just their version of Congress SLS) etc.

Lots of other possibilities

[fyngyrz]

Keep in mind the closer to us the occultation is occurring, the smaller the occluding object needs to be. Could just be a small chunk of matter in interstellar space moving along a coincidental path nearer to us than the star in question. You know how big an object would have to be to completely occult our sun from the edge of our solar system? You could carry a whole collection of them in one pocket.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[ColdWetDog]

A pocket sized collection of things going very quickly around the solar system to account for the periodic occlusions?

I'm not saying it was aliens, but ....

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Electricity Likes Me]

Except if this were the case we would see diffraction spectra from the edge of the occluding object. We would also be able to find the object and measure it directly: in the attached paper they do a detailed follow up where no such occluding objects are discovered.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[OrangeTide]

It's an armada, heading directly towards us.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

A pocket sized collection of things going very quickly around the solar system to account for the periodic occlusions?

But what if it was an object orbiting another dark object, in a plane perpendicular to our line of sight (around axis parallel to our line of sight)? It would periodically occlude that much more distant and much bigger bright object.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[dpidcoe]

Giant solar sails would dim the light from the star (small object occluding at a distance and all that), and the brightness could actually be a giant laser array constructed to propel the ship faster towards us.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[fyngyrz]

A pocket sized collection of things going very quickly around the solar system to account for the periodic occlusions?

All it would need to be is an irregular object with a spin. Think about it. If I put you in one spot, and an irregular, spinning object more-or-less between you and what you want to look at, what happens to your view of the object?

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

How many variables does it take until I can start shouting: Occam's razor!!!! Remember Occam's razor!!!

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[p0p0]

A very tiny one, and very much offended.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[unencode200x]

Great point. Sort of like an eclipse.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[jfdavis668]

Incoming Pak Protectors? Maybe an invasion of Moties?

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Triklyn]

time to increase spending on our intergalactic canine defense force i guess.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[ngc5194]

True, but for there to be frequent occultations, there would then need to be a lot of these chunks, much larger and denser than we see in our own asteroid belt, Kuiper belt, or Oort cloud. While this is certainly theoretically possible, it's hard to imagine how so much mass could form in such a configuration.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[fyngyrz]

No, you just need one, in the right place, spinning. :)

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[DRJlaw]

We generally look for cyclical, minute (1%) variations in star light to detect planets. But we found one that has a variation in starlight of over 20%.

[From TFA] There are dips in the light, but they aren't periodic. They can be very deep; one dropped the amount of starlight by 15 percent, and another by a whopping 22 percent!

All it would need to be is an irregular object with a spin. Think about it. If I put you in one spot, and an irregular, spinning object more-or-less between you and what you want to look at, what happens to your view of the object?

Your irregularly shaped object would still produce periodic variation, merely periodicity that is a combination of the period of orbit and the period of rotation.

More pointedly, explain how one obtains an irregularly shaped, larger-than-planet sized object. Because anything larger than about 300km in radius is going to become principally spherical due to self-gravity. And any object smaller than a planet should not dim the star by 20x more than a planet would.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that anything large enough to be hot enough to be visible at this distance will be crushed into a sphere, just like every star and planet we know of larger than Ceres, and even that's pretty close to spherical.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[DoctorBit]

They noticed odd things about the light curve throughout the four-year observation period, while the earth was making four orbits around the sun, so the occulting object would have to be big enough to occult the the star from anywhere in earth's orbit. That means an occulting object would have to have significant size compared to the area of either the earth' s orbital area or the star's cross-sectional area, whichever is smaller.

Re:Lots of other possibilities

[Anonymous Coward]

But it would need to be a very big irregular object. And by gravity, most very big objects are regular.

While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlikely"

[orlanz]

While we "watch" them build their sphere, they would have already completed it, detected us using their advanced long range sensors, and used their FTL armada of battleships to come destroy us. Since we are still here, that is a NOT a Dyson sphere.

Ring World is more likely

[Anonymous Coward]

A sphere is a huge amount of mass whereas a ring world would optimize the real estate

What if monkeys really fly out of Madonna's butt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more likely this being, it would solve the riddle why Madonna is such a bitch in her old age.

Ancient Aliens?

[jsepeta]

When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)

Re:Ancient Aliens?

[wonkey_monkey]

we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)

Leave that to the scientists. This is the internet!

Re:Ancient Aliens?

[LateArthurDent]

When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)

That's not actually what Occam's Razor says. What Occam's Razor says is that we should consider all explanations that haven't been proven false by evidence. When two explanations give the exact same predictions, and therefore can't be differentiated through observation of evidence, then you assume the simpler one. Not because it has a higher probability of being right, because given nothing to differentiate between the two theories, you can't make that claim. Simply because even if the more complex explanation is right, the simpler explanation is clearly an excellent model for it.

In this case, there's a perfectly natural explanation that seems to fit the case. By all means, let's not assume that it's aliens and make decisions based on that conclusion. The dominant theory at the moment should be debris by a large planetary collision. That said, we have nothing to falsify the partial Dyson Sphere theory, and it does give some different predictions than the natural explanations. So it absolutely means we should dedicate some telescope time and see if we can gather more evidence for or against all possible explanations. That's how science works.

Re:Ancient Aliens?

[Anonymous Coward]

BravO

well said. yes lets assume the more plausible theory but lets not discount ANY possible idea... and lets do a lot more study on such an interesting phenomenon.

I, for one, hope it IS an alien civilization, but that doesn't make it so..lets do our best to find out.

why build a Dyson sphere?

[bkmoore]

If an alien civilization had the means to build a Dyson sphere, why would they want to do it? By definition, they would also have to have the ability to assemble or disassemble large planets and to make them inhabitable and should be able to make as many planets as they needed.

Re:why build a Dyson sphere?

[Electricity Likes Me]

Planets are inefficient at providing living space.

Re:why build a Dyson sphere?

[fahrbot-bot]

The original purpose, as described in the Bad Astronomy link, is that Dyson proposed this for generating power, not living space:

Look at our own civilization. We consume ever-increasing amounts of power, and are always looking for bigger sources. Fossil, nuclear, solar, wind Decades ago, physicist Freeman Dyson popularized an interesting idea: What if we built thousands of gigantic solar panels, kilometers across, and put them in orbit around the Sun? They’d capture sunlight, convert it to energy, and that could be beamed to Earth for our use. Need more power? Build more panels! An advanced civilization could eventually build millions, billions of them.

Re:why build a Dyson sphere?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't manmade fusion be more energetic than solar fusion? The sun produces less energy than a compost pile because the fusion is incredibly slow--like only a couple of fusion events per second per square meter. If a civilization could build a Dyson sphere, it stands to reason they could also harvest hydrogen from the star and fuse it themselves.

Living space would make more sense. Or just sheer will. Some theories posit the rise of intelligent life as a natural property of the universe--it hastens the entropic death of the universe. Life expends energy much more quickly than most other physical phenomena, and intelligent life even more so. Perhaps most intelligent life will build things just because they can. They'll always find a justification--it's fundamental to being intelligent.

Re:why build a Dyson sphere?

[painandgreed]

If an alien civilization had the means to build a Dyson sphere, why would they want to do it? By definition, they would also have to have the ability to assemble or disassemble large planets and to make them inhabitable and should be able to make as many planets as they needed.

Because gathering more energy from the present star is easier than trying to get to a different star. It's quite possible that the time and energy needed to get to another star makes it impractical even at very high levels of technology. It's sort of like why people live around an oasis and if they can't carry enough water to make it to the next oasis, then they just have to stick with the one they are already at.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[sshir]

What if that armada is causing the whole blinking effect? Like it's on the straight path from their star to ours, we and they are jittering a bit. Boom! An explanation! :)

Will be boring once we find out.

[GuB-42]

We always imagine great things at the slightest anomaly, only to find the boring truth later.
Maybe it is just Jesus playing with a dimmer switch. Kids like to play with dad's things you know.

Re:Will be boring once we find out.

[Anonymous Coward]

We always imagine great things at the slightest anomaly, only to find the boring truth later.
Maybe it is just Jesus playing with a dimmer switch. Kids like to play with dad's things you know.

No, its more like "Every time we actually look, we are astonished at how little imagination we had".
e.g.
Mars, (oh shit, it looks like the moon!)
Io, (oh shit, it's melted sulfur!)
Pluto... don't even bother going there its going to be the coldest most boring thing yet.. (oh shit....... )

The slightest anomaly in a bit of math led to the discovery of the Neutrino, and poof Japan has no eyebrows and the war is over for a while.

Growing evidence that predictions of the after life made man could be .. simplistic.

Leave "common sense" to a critical thinker. Its too dangerous in the hands of lazy minds.

Re:Will be boring once we find out.

[amicusNYCL]

Whatever the explanation is, something that is big enough to block over 20% of a star's light isn't going to be boring.

Re:Will be boring once we find out.

[rmdingler]

Very, very clever.

Re:Will be boring once we find out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well that guy is tired of giving us hints through masses (movies):
- Armagedon (couple of thousands dead);
- Independence Day (most major cities wiped out);
- Interstelar (most of people dead);

Notice our chances dimming?

However for some 99.55% of budget spend on solving local problems are not enough.. and spending 0.45% on saving civilisation too much..

Give NASA a proper budget for God's sake, or next time dimming switch will be used on our Sun... still will not be enough though..

Re:Will be boring once we find out.

[Anonymous Coward]

Give NASA a proper budget for God's sake, or next time dimming switch will be used on our Sun... still will not be enough though..

They will just say that global warming is no longer an issue... or that the God solved the global warming as they were saying for years he will..

Zomg

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Why bother creating an actual sphere if you just want the energy. It is worse for balance than a ringworld. Stick with orbitting rings at different distances and you can still live in slowly rotating megastructures.

And much less worry about a stellar-level catastrophe from a zombie apocalypse.

It's the Vogons

[De_Boswachter]

They are building an intergalactic highway, and the star is simply in its way.

Brought to you by...

[Anonymous Coward]

*MoviePhone voice*

From the producers of global warming and climate change... Aliens in Space: The Dyson Sphere. Just when you thought you were doomed to bake from greenhouse gasses caused by excessive cow farts, copious amounts of grant monies, and globe trotting sauced college kids I mean research scientists... Now... we bring you threat of destruction from space aliens who can build Dyson Spheres and travel through worm holes.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Anonymous Coward]

Your scenario requires that these hypothetical imaginary aliens also possess the personality trait of being assholes. Maybe the real reason they're putting up a dyson sphere because they're shy, and they want people to stop looking at them?

Fanciful notions

[fahrbot-bot]

The Bad Astronomy link contains a few fanciful notions. Specifically, Phil Plait says:

[yada, yada, yada, ...] That’s the whole basis of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see the movie Contact, or better yet read the book, for more on this).

Read a book? With words and stuff? Talk about science fiction. :-)

just proof of...

[mschaffer]

This is just proof of how anything that has the word "Dyson" makes the news.
http://www.abbysguide.com/vacu...

Re:just proof of...

[Anonymous Coward]

That guy's a kook. The vacuums are cheaply made, difficult to repair and way over-priced. I run a vacuum repair shop so I do have some relevant experience. But they pivot on a ball (sphere?)

Re:just proof of...

[Anonymous Coward]

Which vacuums would you recommend?

Re:just proof of...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just proof of how anything that has the word "Dyson" makes the news.
http://www.abbysguide.com/vacu...

I don't ever hear about Dyson vacuums on the news.. just commercials.. just saying!

Please Ignore This Post

[Anonymous Coward]

4f72 a3c9 2432 0c36
aab3 d608 933e 197e
f2bb df20 c5d9 2cdd
2604 2f07 dd97 29f6
7090 c963 efe2 28d3
7282 0c84 e9d6 97b6
808f e404 6037 caeb
5a68 286e 6429 a49d

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Fire_Wraith]

Earth has only been broadcasting since the early 20th century. At 1500 LY away, they're still seeing light/etc from Earth around the end of the Roman Empire. Excluding the possibility of some sort of sensor/communication system that defies relativity, any aliens there won't see us until around 3420 AD our time. A response wouldn't be able to arrive until 5000AD or later, probably much more if they were trying to send actual ships.

At this point, only star systems within 100LY of Sol are the ones we would be concerned about - and we can be reasonably sure that the ones within 50LY either don't have anyone listening, or that they have elected not to respond in a way that we've noticed.

Re:Can't believe Phil Plait

[Anonymous Coward]

Blogging is better than having to find a real job.

Where is Occam when we need it?

[luis_a_espinal]

Cuz really, there is a lot of bat-shit crazy speculation going on in the interweebz.

Not likely

[Anonymous Coward]

A Dyson Sphere would take so much energy and resources to build that it would be counter productive. it makes good science fiction, but that's it.

I think this is likely a transient object between us and the star, or more likely, an anomaly in the star itself.

Re:Not likely

[MightyMartian]

This makes the assumption that energy will be as difficult to harness for an alien civilization as it is for us, which I sincerely doubt.

The Universe is filled unimaginable amounts of energy, it just needs sufficient technological development to harness it. Moving 150,000 tons of goods in one ship would have been unimaginable five centuries ago, and yet that's what one container ship can move today.

Natural Explanations

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

FTFA, "we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event." So yes, there are natural explanations.

Best way to send out signals to other life forms.

[Fly Swatter]

Make your own star, or one you can access, blink.

More probable scenario

[paiute]

By the time a civilization's technology evolves to the point that it could build a Dyson sphere, it won't have to.

Re:More probable scenario

[flopsquad]

"If you have to ask how much my Dyson sphere cost, you can't afford it."

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth has only been broadcasting since the early 20th century. At 1500 LY away, they're still seeing light/etc from Earth around the end of the Roman Empire.

You mean the Western Roman Empire. But I got the idea.

Stephen Baxter xeelee series

[MarkH]

Grest set of books if want to see some big physics ideas in a readable fun sci-fi novel (s)

Re:Best way to send out signals to other life form

[GameboyRMH]

I was thinking the same thing, if this is an interstellar signal lamp, it would probably display a repeating pattern since anything else could be mistaken for a natural occurrence. When they find a star also displaying a repeating pattern, then they know they've got 2-way communication and could try to send a meaningful message. Too bad about the latency though...

A living entity

[Tony Isaac]

If you've ever watched Star Trek, you know that every strange phenomenon is an indication that the nebula, or asteroid belt, or whatever...is actually a living, sentient being. Maybe THAT'S what's going on here!

Re:A living entity

[leonardluen]

i suggest we give them a grant to buy some red shirts and have them observe this star. if they all die in some horrific accident then we will know for sure.

Interstellar debris?

[wronkiew]

How is it that Plait says no excess infrared means it isn't dust clouds and unlikely comets, but then he turns around and suggests Dyson sphere? One of the defining characteristics of Dyson spheres is excess infrared.

Here is a hypothesis that fits the data gathered so far: interstellar debris. It can be oddly shaped. It can block the star's light without generating excess infrared. A cloud of it passing between Earth and KIC 8462852 would produce non-periodic luminosity variations. If the debris was a light year away from Earth, the largest chunk would have a diameter of around 500 km. There would be no constraints due to orbital velocity, and no aliens.

Re:Interstellar debris?

[thoromyr]

Oh, now you've done it -- gone and outed the Earth's early defense system. The G'lak advance ships were just blown to smithereens and... wait, there's some guys dressed in black knocking at my door.

Re:Interstellar debris?

[jandrese]

You wouldn't necessarily get excess infrared from a Dyson Sphere. The whole point is to collect the energy output of the star and pipe it somewhere else. If the infrared can also be collected then you could have quite a dark object with an unimaginably large power output. It's hard to imagine what you would do that with that much power.

Re:Interstellar debris?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem with that is that the debris would have to be very oddly shaped, like bands of equally dense debris followed by diffuse debris. That is EXTREMELY unlikely to happen. A Dyson sphere would indeed produce excess infrared radiation, but if it is very efficient it would produce less than interstellar debris. I'm not saying to jump to conclusions about it being one, but I find it interesting that every other idea, a large planet which would cause a star wobble, rapid pulsing of star activity and interstellar gas has been ruled out. It just means the scientists are running out of things to look at for explanation.

More studying of it should help, get that James Webb Telescope up there!

Re:This is a religion

[Immerman]

No, it's entertaining speculation put forth by scientists who fully believe that a natural explanation is more likely, but haven't yet found one that fits the data. Otherwise known as "cocktail-party conversation"

On/off star

[Anonymous Coward]

Spiders! Deepness! The great lurk! Mindrot! Larsen localizers!

Think horses, not zebras

[sjbe]

Really? We're going straight for the absurdly unlikely sci-fi answer? That's like the people who claim UFOs must be of alien origin conveniently forgetting what the U in UFO stands for.

There's a saying that when you hear the sound of hoofs you should be thinking horses, not zebras. You can include it on the list of possibilities but it should be somewhere near the bottom.

Re:Think horses, not zebras

[ngc5194]

If you read the articles, this is the approach both the original research authors and Phil Plait have taken. It's most likely something mundane that we haven't seen before, but unlike most of what we observe, it's unusual enough that we can't yet rule out something more exotic. While no doubt silly people will misinterpret this, to me, the actual scientists who have commented on this have done so responsibly.

Dyson swarm can be dual purpose

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they made a dyson swarm with dual purpose, if they place a swarm of solar panels inside the orbit of a planet that is closer to the star then the home planet. They can use the shadow that those solar panels cause to reduce the heat on the closer planet to be more hospitable to life.

No wonder Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

does not want his name linked to his folly. He knows that only crackpots think seriously about Dyson Spheres/Rings/Swarms.

Signal beam?

[Anonymous Coward]

A large dip with several short dips inside it sounds an awful lot like a carrier wave with data in it. Is it possible to amplitude-modulate a star?

Obviously then...

[Ecuador]

It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!

Re:Obviously then...

[Dragonslicer]

It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!

Well that would explain why the light from the star is plaid.

Re:Obviously then...

[GTRacer]

That's ludicrous, I say!

Library of Babel

[TooManyNames]

I've confirmed that the star has a Dyson Sphere by consulting the comprehensive Library of Babel. Concealed in page 304 of one of its texts is the sentence, "kic eight four six two eight five two is a star fifteen hundred light years away, which is known for its elaborate dyson sphere." Clearly, we will have much to discuss our new sphere-building brethren.

Your news is 1480 years old

[Anonymous Coward]

>caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact
KIC 8462852 is 1480 light years away from us, so what we see now happened there 1.5 millennium ago.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Immerman]

Nah, they probably know that that there's life here (unless they regard an oxygen atmosphere as a caustic toxin that would make life impossible, or are so convinced of their own uniqueness that they haven't bothered to look), but it'll be another 1400 years or so before they will see the atmospheric changes that indicate there might be a technological species here.

Of course a species capable of building a Dyson's sphere might well be curious enough to spend a pittance of their resources to send observation probes to get a closer look at a living world, but until at least a tiny shred of evidence of is found that FTL is possible it's probably a safe bet that they're still watching a bunch of primitives that are centuries away from inventing the concept of zero. A starfaring civilization doesn't need an armada to conquer that, a bunch of "college students" on a road trip could wipe us out by accident.

Meanwhile they're obviously confident enough that they don't mind broadcasting their location to every intelligent species in the galaxy by occluding their star in an an obviously artificial manner, so unless they're incredibly xenophobic they shouldn't feel even remotely threatened by us, and when you have the power of a star at your fingertips terraforming worlds or building massive artificial habitats around neighboring stars is probably a lot more convenient and appealing than traveling for thousands of years to settle a distant and nondescript star. They might establish a research outpost, but the logistics of interstellar travel are unlikely to make colonizing our system appealing until their empire expands to include the all the appealing stars closer to them.

And considering that there are about 1400 star systems within 50 light years of us (~130 of which are similar to the Sun), there's probably (at an insanely rough estimate) about 1400*(1500/50)^3 = 40 million star systems closer to them than us, over 3 million of which have stars similar to the sun. I suspect they have plenty of real estate available before they feel the need to take ours.

Watch out, jfdavis668 is Paking good SF

[fyngyrz]

Ah, the Pak. You win the Internets today, sir or madam. You should be awarded an honorary Tree-of-Life simulacrum.

Re:Watch out, jfdavis668 is Paking good SF

[Coren22]

I was thinking it could be a Shipstar...

http://www.amazon.com/Shipstar...

Re:Watch out, jfdavis668 is Paking good SF

[fyngyrz]

Er... are there Pak in "Shipstar"? The blurb doesn't seem to indicate that, but I'd read it in a heartbeat if so...

Re:Watch out, jfdavis668 is Paking good SF

[Coren22]

Shipstar doesn't take place in the known space universe. But I imagine looking at the exhaust of that ship would make for a rather odd star.

extremely low probability but worth checking

[joe_frisch]

It is exceedingly unlikely this is the result of the actions of an alien civilization, but the importance of such a discovery makes it worth some effort to investigate. In any case its a non-understood astrophysical phenomenon so its interesting to investigate in any case.

If you see something strange, studying more is a good plan in general

Alien's Razor

[bigpat]

Among competing hypotheses, the one with Aliens should be selected.

Re:Alien's Razor

[tehcyder]

Among competing hypotheses, the one with Aliens should be selected.

This is just a special case of Awesome's Razor.

Always multiply complexities provided they give an awesome result.

they are ! aliens

[cheap.computer]

As long as they are on their planet they are not aliens but inhabitants of planet XYZ.. An English major them Aliens is being politically incorrect and insensitive.

Cue hyperventilation from Richard Hoagland...

[Mike Van Pelt]

... 3... 2... 1...

Not optimistic

[argStyopa]

Frankly, if we had evidence that there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere out there, I'd be terrified.

I'm not optimistic that all civilizations at that level of tech will somehow magically be all peaceful and loving. Life is struggle, and anything that "wins" at evolution has to be a tremendous competitor.

Re:Not optimistic

[painandgreed]

Frankly, if we had evidence that there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere out there, I'd be terrified.

I'm not optimistic that all civilizations at that level of tech will somehow magically be all peaceful and loving. Life is struggle, and anything that "wins" at evolution has to be a tremendous competitor.

If there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere and there is only one of them, then it's a pretty good sign that travel between the stars is impractical if not impossible.

Informative?!

[bsdasym]

If we were seeing laser light mixed in at those power levels, we'd know it immediately. It's extremely unnatural.

Re:Informative?!

[dpidcoe]

(I was making a reference to one of the best hard sci-fi books ever written)

Re:Best way to send out signals to other life form

[DriveDog]

If the signal is not an obvious message, it'll be less likely to influence the society of the recipients. Perhaps the tranmitters figure that a civilization advanced enough to interpret their message may be advanced enough to avoid destroying itself upon receipt. Or maybe the reverse—civilizations advanced enough to interpret the message are advanced enough to be a threat, so the message is a warning or designed to incite riots or something. Lesser civilizations are no threat, so no need to disrupt them by inserting information into them. The answer to the Fermi Paradox is, then, that a single civilization does exist in our galaxy, but it only takes action when it detects another to hinder the other's advance. Once we find the one, we're doomed.

Ringworld!

[Anonymous Coward]

it's a ring world!

Re:Ringworld!

[NicknameUnavailable]

Or life is everywhere and we're among a handful of mentally-challenged species that build a big enough telescope to spot someone before inventing warp drive.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[jandrese]

If they have FTL then all of those distance/time calculations are blown to hell.

I'm not saying, radius...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but radius.

Merger event?

[MessyBlob]

Occam's Razor please! It's most likely to be the absorption of a star-scale body, or occlusion by fast-moving matter.

So we'll be building our at the same timeâ

[asjk]

Since they're 1,500 light-years away.

While we are making wild speculations..

[Anonymous Coward]

I will go comic book and give one with a double meaning:

This phenomenon we are viewing around this star could be due to Parallax!

I'm thinking,

Where is the green lantern when we need him and.. Perhaps we should try looking at the star with one hand over one eye.

Stapledon Sphere dammit!!!!

[reboot246]

Give credit where credit is due. Olaf Stapledon was the first to describe such a sphere. Dyson borrowed (i.e. stole) the idea. Stapledon was one of the greatest sci-fi writers, but most people have never heard of him, much less read his works.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Anonymous Coward]

and we can be reasonably sure that the ones within 50LY either don't have anyone listening, or that they have elected not to respond in a way that we've noticed.

<tinfoilhat>you forgot government coverup. Maybe they have responded...</tinfoilhat>

MorningLightMountain

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely Dudley Bose has something to say about this.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Mal-2]

"I seem to be having tremendous difficulty with my lifestyle."

Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye, people. It's the Vl'hurgs.

Or, just get a small dog.

Re:While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlike

[Anonymous Coward]

They will just fly past Earth and start building another Dyson Sphere... by the time they get to Earth for materials (after dismantling inner planets and easily accessible comets and asteroids) we will all be just huge block of ice.

Re:Best way to send out signals to other life form

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately: Repeating patterns are what nature is actually VERY GOOD at creating. Do you look like your folks?

The Black Armada

[OrangeTide]

The Black Armada also explains dark matter. It's their stealth technology.

Dyson spheres were just a tool in a theory

[Anonymous Coward]

...to explain why we do not sense alien civilisations. Just like a hypothetical factor in an equation, not as something that really exist. Think first, post later.

IT Troubleshooting - Planet Style

[Dareth]

If the facts don't make sense for a single planet, why not several different planets. Maybe their planets are not as neatly arranged as in our solar system, so maybe they go in different directions on different planes of orbit.

Re: These comments

[Anonymous Coward]

These comments have gone from suck to blow!

Alt.Hot.Grits

[Anonymous Coward]

Alt.Hot.Grits

Karakoulas will say its a pyramid

[Anonymous Coward]

And that the universe is a holograph that's a subroutine of the simulation we're all a part of. Tune into the History channel for further details

Mod this up.

[neoshroom]

It deserves it.

Dampening Field?

[DarthVain]

Sorry for the Star Trek lingo, but might it not be something dampening the nuclear processes at work, actually dimming the star, rather than something having to occlude it to describe its variable nature? Is such a thing possible without the destruction of the star? Perhaps something like a blackhole with a very elliptical orbit around the star, where at times it comes close enough to suck up much of the stars output?

RTFA

[RockDoctor]

Not that anyone will, but I'll start the comment whole the ARXIV article is opening, then Read The Fucking Article, then maybe spout uninformed bullshit.

[Beats head against floor. ]

By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event. We discuss the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system.

Well fuck me sideways - a far less revolutionary interpretatino, from people who have spent months more reading the data than the average Slash-dotter.

I can see why the count of low-digit-count contributors is decreasing.