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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.
But if their Congressional funding got cut mid-sphere... Dyson's Bowl.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.