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Could Giant Alien Structures Be Dimming a Far Away Star? (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit quotes a report from Science Magazine: Astronomers and alien life enthusiasts alike are buzzing over the sudden dimming of an otherwise unremarkable star 1300 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. KIC 8462852 or "Tabby's star" has dimmed like this several times before, prompting some researchers to suggest that the megastructures of an advanced alien civilization might be blocking its light. And now -- based on new data from numerous telescopes -- it's doing it again. "This is the first clear dip we have seen since [2013], and the first we have ever caught in real time," says Jason Wright, an astronomer at Pennsylvania State University in State College. If they can rope in more telescopes, astronomers hope to gather enough data to finally figure out what's going on. "This could be the first of several dips about to come," says astronomer David Kipping of Columbia University. "Many observers will be closely watching." KIC 8462852 was first noticed to be dipping in brightness at seemingly random intervals between 2011 and 2013 by NASA's Kepler telescope. Kepler, launched to observe the stellar dimmings caused when an exoplanet passes in front of its star, revealed that the dimming of Tabby's star was much more erratic than a typical planetary transit. It was also more extreme, with its brightness sometimes dropping by as much as 20%. This was not the passage of a small circular planet, but of something much larger and more irregular.
Betteridge's law of headlines.
You are aware that the air we breathe is actually highly corrosive? That stuff once killed nearly everything that lived on this planet!
Seriously, don't mess with Oxygen. It's poisonous.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A more mundane explanation like the below.
we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous break-up event, possibly caused by tidal disruption or thermal processing.
Which is in the link to the paper.
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Only Americans try that. If you want good service in Paris - the answer is really easy, don't speak English.
It doesn't matter what you DO speak - as long as it's not English.
Parisian waiters are the most polite and courteous in the world - to anybody who speaks any language other than English. They will spend however much time they need to understand what you wish to order, as long as it's not being done in English.
Once you've confirmed that you speak a language other than English - you can then switch to it if it's your only common tongue with no repercussion - you just need to prove you're neither British nor American.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Here's the problem. All our good "mundane" explanations were all conclusively disproved. Now what?
Now we put it in the "don't know" file until we come up with a good explanation. Any explanation which is not testable isn't science, it's just imagination.
There's nothing inherently untestable about the theory. Perhaps we don't know to test it, and perhaps we lack technology needed to test some aspects of it, but those don't make it untestable. There are predictions of modern physics which we either don't know how to test, or know how but lack the technology to perform the tests. That doesn't make those aspects unscientific.
In this case, I think we do have some ideas about how to test. We can identify ways in which dimming would be different if caused by a partially-constructed Dyson sphere vs other sorts of astronomical phenomena, then observe and analyze to see which hypotheses hold up. We could potentially find a way to construct a telescope capable of letting us see sufficient detail at 1300 light years' distance to more directly observe the occlusion. Such a "telescope" might consist of exploiting gravitational lensing of light passing distant stars, coupled with massive computation. Though it would take a very long time, we might even test it by sending a spacecraft. There are lots of ways to test, even though many of them are not currently practical, and undoubtedly there are many ways of testing which no one has yet thought of.
The only truly untestable theories are those which either make no specific predictions or which can predict anything at all.
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