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

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: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: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: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.