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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.
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".
...but still fun to wildly speculate about.
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.
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?
Chance favors the prepared mind.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
I don't care about this. I just need to know if it will still vacuum efficiently.
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.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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.
Have gnu, will travel.
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....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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!
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.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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.
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! :)
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.
we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
Leave that to the scientists. This is the internet!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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"...
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
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.
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
It could be anything; a faulty stench coil...some cheese on the lens.... Who knows?
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.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
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."
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!
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.
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).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
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.
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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.
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.
It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!
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You mean, like something broken up passing in front of the star? Which is the leading hypothesis presented in the paper?
The War of 1812... the good 'ol days when the federal government actually tried to save New Orleans.
or, you know, a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
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.