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Comets Can't Explain Weird 'Alien Megastructure' Star After All (newscientist.com)
schwit1 sends the latest news about KIC 8462852, the star that that led many to learn what a Dyson Sphere is. New Scientist reports: "The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, it might be aliens. Known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby's star, it has been baffling astronomers for the past few months after a team of researchers noticed its light seemed to be dipping in brightness in bizarre ways. Proposed explanations ranged from a cloud of comets to orbiting 'alien megastructures'. Now an analysis of historical observations reveals the star has been gradually dimming for over a century, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the cause. Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University saw the same century-long dimming in his manual readings, and calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each 200 kilometres wide, to have passed by the star — completely implausible, he says. 'The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot,' he says. 'But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas.' 'This presents some trouble for the comet hypothesis,' says Boyajian. 'We need more data through continuous monitoring to figure out what is going on.' What about those alien megastructures? Schafer is unconvinced. 'The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations,' he says, as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says."
I'm not saying it's aliens but it's aliens!
Tonight on the History Channel.
Clearly the aliens left a 3D printer running too long and now they have 3D grey goo all over their solar system!
It's not comets and it's not a Dyson sphere. Any ideas what it actually is then?
Send quantuum busters, we won't get a Second Chance.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. --Summary
So maybe the aliens aren't building it. Maybe they're just moving it... towards us...
FTA: "The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, it might be aliens."
My respect for newscientist just dropped significantly.
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries? (We've just been seeing a dimming signal over that period, not complete extinction of the star's light.)
I mean, yeah, I have some idea of the energies involved, and I'm not sure I can envision a process that would run at that pace producing anything other than streams of plasma at gamma-ray temperatures. But then again, I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace. Good thing I didn't accept that particular process-design gig, I guess.
... he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century.
Clarke's first law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Sync your "spooky action at a distance" thing to it and listen to Galactic Wide Radio! KBOM!
He doesn't think aliens could be capable of building something to cover a fifth of a star in a century?
Look. Being sincere here, how the pyramids was built is still considered speculation by man, as there's no direct evidence of how they were built.
So right here, on planet Earth, the same types of people - scientists - are incapable of understanding how a large structure the size of the pyramids was built a couple thousand years ago..
Personally, I think these scientists need to understand just because they cannot imagine how something is or could be done, does not mean others cannot and are actually actively doing things well beyond their comprehension...
"We must fall back upon the old axiom that when all other contingencies fail, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." – The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans
Translation: if no other explanations work, then "weird alien megastructure" could well be the last standing contingency, and therefore, the truth.
Discuss.
-Z
until we figure out what's going on!
if you look good enough you can see darth sidious waving.
Up next we will be told about the terrafugia, a car that can fly without proper weight-lift distribution.
Centuries ago the Tholians completed a sticky web around the entire star. After hundreds of years of collecting dust, rocks, ice the star is starting to dim due to accumulation of crap stuck in the web. There are also huge globs of rocks in one area where some of the stars planets and all of a nearby orbiting stars planets got stuck.
This star is larger than our Sun, yet it rotates thirty times faster. Its poles are significantly flatter, hotter, and brighter than the rest of the star. Thus a large object could block 22% of the star's light while covering a much smaller percentage of its disk. This also explains why the dips in the light curve are pointed on the bottom, not flat.
There could also be a large unseen planet (i.e. one that does not transit the star from our point of view) pulling on the star's tidal bulge and causing its visible pole to slowly precess away from us. That would explain the gradual dimming.
Maybe it's not an alien megastructure maybe it's an alien fleet heading straight to planet earth. As it gets closer and assuming they maintained their star being behind them so we all scratch our heads while it's getting closer.
If it is not a group of objects shading a single star it could be multiple small luminous objects in a chaotic orbit close in around a black hole or some similar configuration that works if you reverse a few assumptions about what it could be. That would explain the absolute dimming effect without any infra-red getting past the shading object.
Roche limit reached about a century and a half ago, breakup continues. A super sized rocky planet which has migrated to within Mercury like distance of it's star and has subsequently been pulled apart. Put the planet in an orbit which is nearly edge on (which it would have to be to be detectable using these methods) and as the debris cloud increases in size the star is progressively dimmed (from our point of view) more and more.
Seems the most obvious explanation.
Interestingly, if you did want make a dyson sphere and you wanted a way to break up some planets to get access to the raw materials then causing them to shift orbits closer to the star might be a way to do it.
Planetary collision, leading to two planets breaking up? There really are all sorts of possible explanations without going straight to dyson sphere builders.
This happened over 1,400 years ago!!
I beg your pardon, but this is already old news. It has been relayed by other channels at least two days ago. If /. still want to pretend being news for nerds, they have to catch up and post news when they are news, not two days later. I am expecting to read news here first, not after everyone has already published them.
Achille Talon
Hop!
What if the aliens are building a Dyson Sphere not around their star but into it ? Think about it ...
According to my 5 year old, maybe that sun is just starting to go night night.
Well, if StarWars 7 taught me anything, it's that Dyson Spheres are passe. This star is being harvested, and we might be better off just not looking in that direction, for fear of getting whacked out of existence.
We can't explain it, therefore it must be aliens
Must be, must be!
I want some aliens
Now!
...then we'll come to dinner.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
It's all the alien diesel space-ships causing smog around that star!
a planet that's broken up, creating an asteroid belt?
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maybe the star isn't screwed in tightly enough. just give it a half twist and see if that stops the flickering. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Well, I guess news according to toddlers might at least be better than Fox or CNN.
We have boring stars (like the sun).We have stars that rotate hundreds of times per second (PSR J1748-2446ad)
We have tiny stars
We have huge stars
We have stars of different luminosities.
Maybe, just maybe, the star is just dimming all on its own.
What if two large planets recently collided, creating a lumpy ring? The plane of the ring could have recently aligned in our direction more, due to relative star motion, accounting for the apparent change in magnitude. Or if the ring is recent enough, it could be "wavy" such that it doesn't always fully align with us.
Table-ized A.I.
I wish everyone would quit with the alien stories already.
It's obviously ghosts.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
So basically, Kylo Ren is sucking the energy out of the star to make a new StarKiller?
"...he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says."
Our grandparents couldn't imagine the technology that our children use today without thought.
How much hubris does it take to believe that we know what kind of technology 'advanced' aliens - or even the grandchildren of our grandchildren - will be able to achieve?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
What if what we're seeing is not inherent dimming of the star from its own internal processes or by its own orbital objects and cloud, but by objects closer to home? In particular, is it possible that a particularly dense portion of the Oort cloud has slipped between the star and us? We're only starting to get a handle on Kuiper belt objects. We really have no idea what's in the Oort cloud or how it's distributed.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
So let's see...
KIC 8462852 is 1480 ly away, and they're on schedule to complete their dyson sphere 1090 years ago.
What would you do with a dyson sphere?
Probably open a wormhole for long distance travel.
We're looking at the ancient aliens, guys!
I for one will welcome our future Dyson Sphere building overlords.
"Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible."
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Elimination is such a dirty process.
'We don't know how this is happening therefore god!'
'We don't know how this is happening therefore alien megastructure based off of one of our own sci-fi author's ideas!'
What if i do not want to have an identity in here? You have a name, you have a history... if you express any opinion from a position that has identity, the argument you make might get judged by WHO is saying it and not by WHAT is being said.
This is how i rationalize my irrational aversion to getting registered on a forum.
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries?
You're all wrong - the star is clearly orbited by a huge swarm of teapots. After all, we can't hope to understand the thinking of a race capable of building such a "Lipton Sphere" so you can't prove its not teapots.
I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace.
PS: I thought the original Dyson Sphere concept was a huge cloud of satellites that eventually grew to capture most of the star's energy.
PPS: The satellites could still be teapot-shaped.
PPPS: The tea-cosies are blocking the infra-red. Nothing worse than cold tea.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
No big deal. The star probably just has an excessively large number of sunspots.
After Kepler finding so many different planets and even here in the solar system where we have so much bizarre conditions (like life) in planets and moons, I wouldn't think that having so many comets around a star is an implausible idea after all. Or aliens. Space is big, all variations of conditions have a big chance to occur. We have life here on Earth (which is a incredible rare event, for sure), we have nitrogen or carbon dioxide blocks sliding down hills on Mars, we have geysers of ice on moons around jupiter, we have underground oceans on a moon of jupiter which surface look like a giant cheese cake with sugar on top of it , we have lakes of methane on titan, even Pluto has a Pluto face draw on it. The sun itself is a wonder, a ball of hydrogen emitting light for billions of years (i find this amazing). i know science has to prove things, but not believing something is not possible in such an enormous universe is silly.
Sure I am dreaming big here, and this is probably some kind of natural phenomena we have never observed before, but why a sphere and not a swarm? OK so if 22% is only covered, this thing looks to be moving, and their Sun is a lot larger than ours, than maybe it is just a Dyson swarm. I mean how much energy do you really need? Regardless, I feel that cool observations like these merit better observation. I know that this thing is ridiculously far away, but why aren't we building tech to launch small probes (maybe the size of baseballs) and communication satellites around other planets - I mean eventually we will need something like Internet access on Mars, Saturn, etc.., so can we have a network of tech to help us gather better data, and gather it quicker? We could be launching small probes at very high speeds, even if its just to the edge of our solar system, and probably be learning some very cool things. I just feel that even if this is some kind of alien megastructure, we won't be able to gather enough proof to make anyone happy. Sure its far away, but imagine that maybe it was only 5 or 10 light years away. Would we really be able to gather the data we need to make an informed decision?
"I just don't feel like shining any more. I'm watching the sentients on my local planet, and they're just mean to each other. It's so sad to watch. I give up. I'm tired of burning hydrogen for these ungrateful whelps. All this fusion for them is giving me iron streaks! Not worth it. I'm going to go spend a few petaseconds focused on some other projects that are less work intensive for me."
"...he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century..."
So, alien megastructures are a possible theory here, but for some reason we want to sit back and believe that construction is the main reason the theory is bunk?
No wonder people on this planet still believe aliens built the pyramids. Seems rather stupid and ignorant to even theorize about limits of alien capability.
Speaking of construction, 100 years ago humans were still marveling at the internal combustion engine...not that we "dumb" humans have really done anything with that technology in the last century...
If it's spinning fast, as it ages it will lose matter in a pre-nova mass ejection in a ring and if that ring is aligned to us, it will occlude the light of the star just as any other gaseous nebula would do.
Job done.
Seems rather conceited for us to say "there's no way they could cover 1/5 of a star in a century" when little more than a century ago one could have found plenty of 'experts' who would poo-poo the idea of powered flight.
Hell, only 30 years ago, nearly every single civilian phone in the world was somehow attached to a wall.
And as far as his comments about black-body radiation from such a structure, it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable for a civilization capable of such engineering such a megastructure in the first place, to have figured out how to convert heat energy into something more usable/consumable.
Yes, I'll be honest: part of me would love there to be evidence of other life in the universe.
OTOH, part of that would be absolutely terrifying. (http://rithmomachia.blogspot.com/2010/04/why-we-should-quit-searching-for-alien.html)
-Styopa
Then... Halflife 3 confirmed!
It's a gigantic planet that exploded and is now scattering the light in odd ways.
-X
It is a pandimensional object transiting our 3d slice.
We only have one rule....is that you obey the laws of physics in the house. My kid is so bad about bouncing off the walls, literally.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Dark Matter. Or Black holes. Possibly something to do with string theory. Or any of the other astronomical whipping boys the physicists cart out when they can't explain something.
TFA says: even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century
According to a stellar husbandry proposal you could cover 1/5 of a star with more than 1/2 inch of material (water density) at 1 astronomical unit radius.
10e21kg/year;4*pi*au^2/5;1g/ml?cm/century
([{1E22 * (kilo*gramm)} / year] * [{(4 * pi) * (au^2)} / 5]^-1) * ([1 * gramm] / [milli*liter])^-1 ? (centi*meter) / century
= 1.7779051 cm/century
Seastead this.
Thats why comets should not be scientists.
on object could be moving toward us or away from us along the path between us and the star. If the object is closer to us it wouldn't need to be huge. like a big rock.
All I read is "I"m a nerdy astronomer that wants attention. I will cry aliens and then I'll be popular" They should learn the lesson from the story of the boy who cried alien.
I just feel obliged to point out that if we are positing an alien civilization that can construct a Dyson Sphere/Cloud that blocks out fully 20% of a star's radiant energy in just under a century then why would we possibly assume that engineering that advanced would necessarily radiate excess infrared heat signatures from such a massive engineering project?
I'm not an astrophysicist, so there's probably a huge hole in this theory. Please anyone with greater knowledge on the subject comment.
What would a extremely massive star turning into a black hole look like? And how quickly would the process take?
Let's say there's a extremely massive star on the brink of becoming a black hole. Then a comet or some other small object falls into this object and pushes the inner core of the star over the tipping point. The inner part of the star outside of the black hole core would still have strong enough gravity to generate fusion, but the star's output would be reduced.
Then as more objects fall into the star the event horizon's diameter increases and the star's output decreases.
Thoughts?
If they were moving it, they would need to be moving it towards the star to explain the observations, not towards us.
OTOH, he already said that Infrared observations had eliminated that option. I believe he was a bit to glib there, however, as generally infrared observations are only done at a few wavelengths, and if they were building a macro-scale structure they probably have nano-scale heat scavengers, which would result in the radiation being emitted in the long infrared, which is not usually observed. (Observing ANY infrared at long distance is already quite difficult. Usually it requires something like liquid helium coolants.)
That said, alien megastructures would be an extremely unexpected finding, and would need stronger evidence to be accepted.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Scientists have already figured out how to transmit information via quantum entanglement. Is it really so hard to believe that in another few hundred years that could maybe be developed into a transporter?
Yes. You clearly worship at the altar of Science but have no idea what it is. We can expect many things in the future but wholesale violations of relativity is not one of them. On a quantum scale some effects do not obey the principle of locality, but this effect cannot be used to transmit information, and even if it could there's nothing to suggest that the transference of quantum state has anything to do with physically moving anything anywhere.
No matter what happens in any arbitrarily long span of scientific development, red will not become blue, down will not become up, and neither (classical) information nor human craft will exceed the speed of light. To believe otherwise is to believe not in science but in fairy stories.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Attempting to build a entirely enclosed sphere around a star would result in MASSIVE support structure to hold the top and bottom away from the star, almost impossible! Yeah one could have a ring or partial sphere, but not the whole thing. It would collapse.
Is it possible that a couple planets collided leaving millions of large pieces of debris that are in unstable orbits and being pulled towards the star, thus decreasing the distance between them and gradually blocking more light from the star? Doesn't need to be "comets", just a couple super-earths that smashed into millions of bits.
In 2001 and sequels, A C Clarke postulated von Neumann-type universal constructor, the first job of which is to make more copies of itself before proceeding to the main task. Given that approach, the main constraints to speed would be the speed of delivery of energy and raw materials. Why would you need even a century?
Before one discounts the ability of some civilizations to build what is considered to be enormous by human standards, a close examination of the hexagonal shape on one pole of Saturn is in order. What would cause a powerful magnetic field which extends into the atmosphere above Saturn while, at the same time, maintaining the integrity of the shape? Quite likely, as NASA is aware, it was caused by contact with one end of an extremely large craft. My experience has taught me that intelligent civilizations are not constrained by our concept of size, shape or elemental configuration.
But not a Dyson sphere. It's called a Baf'cnar Sphere. Named after it's inventor, from the planet Gluk Erusha. Dyson is just some guy that sells weird vacuum cleaners which don't work worth a damn. Have you ever used one to get dirt out of a vacuum?
Have gnu, will travel.
Rather than assuming aliens, it's far simpler to assume it's a natural phenomenon, like a cloud of dust passing between us and the star.
Have you read my blog lately?
Use less energy and live within it's means. Why would the "natural progression" of intelligent life consume more and more energy?
I bet the really smart aliens use hardly any energy and completely evade our means of even recognizing them.
maybe a couple of [rogue] planets collided?
When the star goes out in only a few thousand years, the weapon will be fully charged and ready to fire!
It has to be true! I saw it in a movie somewhere...
It is clearly orbited by a starkiller base. Or at least that's about as likely as a Dyson sphere.
sudo ergo sum
anyone thought it could be a planet that was close to the sun and has imploded / exploded and now its particles are revolving around the star?
Massive chunks of nuked planet orbiting the star.
Sphere
If this is a Dyson Sphere we have less than 1400 years before they will see a transmission from us. And then we need to hope they are friendly or just don't care about primitive planets.
If they are building a Dyson Sphere they started this before 600 AD, and our technology is not going to be anywhere close to what they will have.
If we are looking at a giant alien version of the James Webb telescope, we would not see excess IR.
End MGM. Get prospective parents of boys to Google: Men do complain
I guess that's what men get as they put on some pounds as they age?
Obviously, it is a dancing, huge-breasted Chieftan of the nudist colony living on a moon in that solar system! The trick is to determine what tune they are dancing to!
Now, back to the more interesting task of studying the astrophysics of it! There's plenty of gorgeous women right here on earth to experience.
Could there be another planetary system eclipsing this? If there is a faint brown dwarf and few planets orbiting it at a distance of 100 ly, then eclipsing by such a s system can explain this anomaly.