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Second Irregularly Dimming Star Found (phys.org)
Long-time Slashdot reader RockDoctor writes: Remember the screaming and welcoming of our Dyson-Sphere-Dwelling 1500 LY distant Overlords that accompanied the news that star KIC 8462852 was irregularly dimming on both short and longer timescales? A second star with a similar light curve has been discovered and reported on ARXIV.
With the euphonious names "EPIC 204278916" and "2MASS J16020757-2257467", the star is a young M1 (red) star, traveling as part of a group of stars which haven't had time to disperse from their place of formation. The age is estimated at 5 — 11 million years. Analysis of 70+ days of data from the K2 mission epoch shows a rotation of 3.6 days, but a period of 25 days near the start of the observation epoch showed dips in intensity of up to 60% lasting for up to about a day each. Details are in the Arxiv paper linked to above, particularly figures 1 and 4.
If confirmed, this discovery changes the situation with interpreting the so-called "Tabby's Star". Firstly with a second object in the class, the odds of it representing a class of naturally occurring objects compared to a unique, unusual object is greatly increased. Secondly, the different celestial mechanical situations around the different stars allows a better estimate of plausible formation mechanisms. One potentially important point is that clumps of debris that could produce these dimmings seem to be quite large. "It is also important to note that the resulting size for the transiting and occulting clump would be quite large at with the clump being in the order of 1.5 times the radius of the Sun. Sadly, this appears to be a new class of "dirty young planetary system." no alien Overlords, no screaming in the streets. Just business-like astronomy.
With the euphonious names "EPIC 204278916" and "2MASS J16020757-2257467", the star is a young M1 (red) star, traveling as part of a group of stars which haven't had time to disperse from their place of formation. The age is estimated at 5 — 11 million years. Analysis of 70+ days of data from the K2 mission epoch shows a rotation of 3.6 days, but a period of 25 days near the start of the observation epoch showed dips in intensity of up to 60% lasting for up to about a day each. Details are in the Arxiv paper linked to above, particularly figures 1 and 4.
If confirmed, this discovery changes the situation with interpreting the so-called "Tabby's Star". Firstly with a second object in the class, the odds of it representing a class of naturally occurring objects compared to a unique, unusual object is greatly increased. Secondly, the different celestial mechanical situations around the different stars allows a better estimate of plausible formation mechanisms. One potentially important point is that clumps of debris that could produce these dimmings seem to be quite large. "It is also important to note that the resulting size for the transiting and occulting clump would be quite large at with the clump being in the order of 1.5 times the radius of the Sun. Sadly, this appears to be a new class of "dirty young planetary system." no alien Overlords, no screaming in the streets. Just business-like astronomy.
It's a Dyson. It shines in a shop window. It dims when you start using it.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
Or...now follow me on this...maybe there are *two* Kardashev-II civilizations out there?
Or it could be two settlements of the same civilization. They are only a few thousand LYs apart, which is a blink on cosmic timescales, so if they are both at about the same stage of development, it is unlikely to be coincidence. It is more likely that they have the same origin.
Rats, you guessed my password!
Table-ized A.I.
Um, no. It couldn't be. "A few thousand lightyears apart" is um, too far. How would someone travel a few thousand light years? It isn't possible, because, you know, Physics. This is what is wrong with Space Nutters: instead of accepting the fact that these are naturally occurring systems, the rush is to assume it is fantastic alien civilizations. Let me break to down for you: there is no intelligent life out there. We are likely the only intelligent civilization that currently exists. There likely have been many before us, and there will be many more after we are gone.
One day you might pull your head out of your ass and realize that there just might be an organism in the known universe with wisdom and intelligence that far outshines yours. Until then, keep assuming that man-made concepts such as "physics" is the reason a far more advanced civilization wouldn't be able to travel quickly through space.
As you try and convince others here of your theory, I should also point out the obvious irony. 100 years ago you wouldn't have been able to convince a single human on this planet that a man would walk on the moon soon, and yet you expect the masses to believe this bullshit.
No other civilization is going to use a Dyson sphere. Their products are so user unfriendly. I bought one of their fans and had to return it because it was so badly thought out. There's no way that company could design a sphere to enclose a sun properly.
Generational ships ...
That is biology based thinking. A civilization this advanced has likely made a full transition to machine based AI. There are no "generations", only periodic upgrades.
What evidence do you have that you can travel faster than the speed of light?
Interstellar travel does not require FTL velocities.
We have known for quite some time that young stars can behave this way. The reason Tabby is odd is because it DOESN’T appear to be young. I doubt the same mechanism will explain both unless Tabby’s age is radically down graded. I suppose that could happen, but the reason I believe it won’t is the highly symmetric first dip and the another dip indicating a huge ring structure object, then came the wacky random fluctuations that without the other two anomalies would like a young planetary forming nebula. On September 14th, GAIA will release its first trove of data on star distances and motion. Likely this data will give us a much better idea about what Tabby’s star is. Still only if and when another occlusion occurs we will really be able to draw some real conclusions.
Letter To Iran
Jules Verne was a space nutter.
Imagine, sending people to the moon by shooting them out of a cannon? The acceleration would kill them.
Solid scientific principles of the day? That's nutter talk. No, it's impossible, Newton said so.
-- Alastair
The most important reason why this deprecates Tabby's Star as an alien megastructure is that at 5-11 million years, this new star is far too young to have undergone planet formation, let alone a highly developed civilization.
The civilization that build the megastructure may have evolved elsewhere and then migrated to this star. The lack of planet formation is an advantage since the first step in building a dyson sphere is to ... disassemble the planets. It would be much easier to start with a cloud of comets and asteroids. That may have been one reason they chose this star for their project.
None of it is plausible. You space nutters with your "antimatter fuel" nonsense. You can't travel near the speed of light. We know that from basic Physics. How are you going to travel "a few thousands light years"?
Bah. Fully qualified experts used to insist going faster than 35 MPH would be fatal. Not crashing, mind you: just going faster than that. It would turn the body to jelly and shatter all your bones. You'd die instantly. When that turned out to not be true, the bar was moved to 100 MPH. That wasn't true either. Then they said we would never fly. We did. Then they said we'd never survive breaking the sound barrier. We did. Then they insisted 1000 MPH was lethal. It isn't. They said helicopters were impossible. They aren't. They said we would never survive going into space, that we would die the moment we tried, that we would never get to the moon much less back from it.
A lot of supposed experts have said we can't do one thing or another, and of course always backed up with charts and numbers and science and stacks of absolutes. And yet time after time they are proven WRONG. The science they relied upon and swore upon to say 35 MPH was lethal---- absolute crap, despite their assurances to the contrary. Most of us break THAT one multiple times a day. I know I have exceeded over four times that speed in my car and I am still here.
The only thing these experts have proven is the overwhelming ability to be wrong about their science and underestimate what people are capable of doing. So perhap it is possible to break the C barrier. We will try. We might even do it. And perhaps it will become just another 35 MPH barrier, meaningless and forgotten.
Sig for hire.
Light manages it. We can't do it so fast, but that's an engineering issue, not a physics ban.
You didn't actually read even the fucking summary, which I spent 3/4 of an hour writing. You fucking unspeakable cad. Piss off back down your troll hole.
Certainly not in your momma's cellar, if you can't even read the fucking summary, let alone the paper linked to from it.
To be precise, we have no evidence for intelligent life outside the Solar system (leaving aside quibbles over whether Voyager 2 has left the heliosphere, it's not even a small fraction of the way to the limit of known gravitationally-bound objects in the Solar System). Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence - or evidence of anything else, either.
This is the position which we have evidence for. However, given that the universe is large, and our locale doesn't seem to be particularly uncommon, it strains credulity.
Almost certainly true. And completely unsupported by any evidence except the very speculation which you decry.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"