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.

Comments

No

[Required Snark]

Glad that I cleared that up for you.

Re:No

[Anonymous Coward]

Betteridge's law of headlines.

Re: No

[Maritz]

I know it's not you claiming this - but if you posit that we live in a simulation, you better have an explanation for why that simulation itself is not a simulation. Very rapid reductio ad absurdum.

Re: No

[zakzor]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Re: No

[msauve]

I call my simulation Turtle It's Turtles all the way down.

Re:No

[mwvdlee]

The answer is, with absolute certainty, "Yes".
If there were aliens and they could make giant structures and those structures were placed between us and some star, it would surely dim.
Whether any of this actually exists is an entirely different question from whether or not it could exist.

Re:No

[Talderas]

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.

Re:No

[drinkypoo]

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.

Re: No

[Diac]

My comment was made on two grounds.

First as a bit of fun using the citation meme when someone makes a large generalized statement in this case the statement of No in reply to a theory of large alien structures dimming a star.

Second the theory that his comment was responding to was based on observable evidence of a distant star dimming in what appears to be random intervals and was a proposal to what was causing this dimming.

There reply of No is not backed up with anything, I am guessing it is this persons believe or lack of believe that giant alien structures could exist that caused them to make there statement rather than any theory about why it could not be the proposed giant alien structures that are causing the dimming.

So to put it simply, Citation please was posted both as a funny comment in reply to a one word response to a theory based on evidence and as commentary that this response had no backing in its statement.

Re:No

[rainmouse]

The burden of proof rests with the proposal, so you can reject out of hand the premise, "We don't know, therefore aliens."

Re:No

[Dunbal]

Archives of the Invisible Space Goat, Chapter 1, page 37. You would do better proving things exist rather than insisting people prove that things don't exist. Otherwise please provide proof that my citation is not real.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Except that I'm pretty sure nobody has made that claim.
What has been said is: "What is being observed is consistent with a partially constructed dyson sphere, and thus far it is not consistent with any other explanation we've had".

Now it's possible that this recurrence will allow for more observations, allowing us to learn more - and narrow things down further. That could easily end up with "We're now quite certain that 1300 years ago there was a partially constructed Dyson sphere around Tabby's star". And the likely assumption that, right now, that sphere is complete (or the project failed and it was never pushed past halfway and there's just a few floating bits of scattered construction equipment now.

The thing is - until there is more evidence, even if something else fitted the observations the odds of it being a Dyson sphere is NO LOWER than that other thing. No, it really is not. We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.
The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS. We've also had the theoretical design for a Dyson sphere for 40 years, we're a long way from building one but there is no theoretical reason whatsoever why, with sufficient technology, it could not be done.

So lets say the new observations STILL fit a Dyson Sphere in progress but ALSO fits a "weird meteor cloud" or something - you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence.

Jumping to "There is alien life" would be a mistake, but jumping to "there is NOT alien life involved" is the EXACT SAME mistake.

Right now, the available evidence is consistent with one thing that would require alien life to exist, and not consistent with anything else. This may change - but right now the odds are, very slightly, in favor of aliens.

Re:No

[TapeCutter]

Betteridge has not failed you, Trump is above the law.

Re:No

[TapeCutter]

Citation please

"Claims made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence" - Hitchen's razor

Re:No

[fyngyrz]

The Father, The Sun and the Holey (Wholly) Goat

Oh, I see where your problem lies. It's:

The fodder, the son and the wooly goat.

It's a story about a shepherd who majored in animal husbandry.

Until they caught him at it.

Re:No

[Jhon]

" you have absolutely no grounds to assume the weird meteor cloud is more likely - in fact it's less likely since we've got no evidence that such a meteor cloud can form, no theory for how it may have formed and no evidence for their existence."

Asteroid belt. But that's fairly uniform. How about a large body (say a small planet or moon) coming close to a much larger body and getting ripped apart? Say, Shoemaker–Levy 9, for example? And you end up with a grouping of 'bits' of that body ending up in an irregular orbit.

Were there a single instance of hard proof extraterrestrial life -- never mind intelligent life, I think we'd be further along the path to 'maybe it's a big artificial construction' vs. something else.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

There's a problem with that - you haven't explained the weird part. The weird part isn't the regularity, plenty of things orbit regularly. The weird part is that we can't see it. Every natural object we know off would, when absorbing light, heat up. 20% of a star's light output it s about 30 megafucktons (to use the proper metric unit) of photons. That will make that thing really hot, we'd be able to see that heat pattern.

Now perhaps we WILL see a heat pattern if we look with more telescopes now - but we've not seen one before. One possible explanation for whatever's blocking the light not heating up - is if that energy is instead being turned into something other than heat, like kinetic or electrical energy. That fits the dyson-sphere idea, but nothing we know of in nature.

I don't think we have enough information to rule it out, and it DOES fit the observed evidence. We don't have enough information to confirm it either - hopefully more information will let us settle on an answer.

And we don't need evidence of extraterestrial life to be forced to consider it a possibility - we have evidence of life in this universe. That alone proves that life is possible in this universe.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

We have absolute PROOF that intelligent life can exist in the universe. We have absolute proof that SPACEFARING life can exist in the universe. We have absolute physical proof that spacefaring life can CONSTRUCT things in space in the universe.

The absolute proof is that we're here and we've done ALL THOSE THINGS.

This does not lead logically to the conclusion that the construction of a Dyson Sphere is possible, since we have not constructed a Dyson Sphere.

Re:No

[tehcyder]

[Genesis 2:7]

You can't argue with facts like that.

Re:No

[jonr]

Ah, good old Ancient Aliens argument. That show is my guilty pleasure.

Re:No

[mark-t]

While you could always do that, this is mostly equivalent to simply assuming that the claim is false, which may be wrong, and provides no opportunity to potentially further one's knowledge beyond its current bounds. The claim may very well still be false, but asking for a citation gives the person an opportunity to provide one which may have only been omitted by oversight or an invalid assumption that was made only about how well known the claim was. The veracity of a citation, if then provided, can be evaluated on its own merits, and if one is not provided in reasonably short order when one is explicitly asked for, then one may safely assume that the claimant has deliberately made a claim that they are unwilling to substantiate, and the claim may then be justly deserved to be dismissed.

Re:No

[boneglorious]

"Were there a single instance of hard proof extraterrestrial life -- never mind intelligent life, I think we'd be further along the path to 'maybe it's a big artificial construction' vs. something else."

What?? extraterrestrial life isn't something special, it's just another case of a system of life like we have here where we are. The fact that we're here doesn't somehow make a big difference between terrestrial life and extraterrestrial life. Terrestrial life is proof that extraterrestrial life is 100% possible, and in fact, there being no other system of life in the universe besides what we have here would be the far weirder case.

Re: No

[Gr8Apes]

Neo: Whoa. Déjà vu.
Neo: A black cat went past us, and then another that looked just like it.
Trinity: How much like it? Was it the same cat?
Neo: It might have been. I'm not sure.
Trinity: A déjà vu is usually a glitch in the Matrix. It happens when they change something.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

Well that or we have to build it really, really thin....

Or, since matter can be converted into energy and vice versa - why not build the Dyson sphere out of matter made from solar energy ?

The thing is, we're talking thousands of years in the future. There is hardly a piece of technology in your life that wouldn't have been deemed impossible - even magical - just a century ago. Now imagine what it would look like to an Aztec ? To a Roman ?

We have no way of predicting what will be possible in a thousand years.

Re:No

[painandgreed]

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.

True, but there are certainly some testable criteria to the hypothesis of a Dyson sphere. If there is a Dyson sphere it should have reached thermal equilibrium by now and so if there is a drop in the normal output of the sun but a rise in the infrared region, it could be assumed that something is occulting the star. The hotter the object, the thinner the occulting object.

Still, what we need right, and what they are calling for, now is more data. The more we know about exactly what is going on, the more likely the solution will come out of it.

Re:No

[swillden]

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.

Re:No

[swillden]

Alternative theories are obviously very appropriate. My understanding (from nothing more than the summary, of course, this is /.) is that competent astronomers have spent time thinking about it and haven't yet found any alternative explanations that fit the facts. That makes aliens -- at the moment -- not only a viable theory, but the best theory.

The knee-jerk reflexive dismissal of the idea is unscientific, especially given the fact that we know that intelligent, technology-producing life has arisen on at least one planet, and that life has invented the notion of a Dyson sphere, although it presently lacks the technology to build one.

Re:No

[amicusNYCL]

You're linking to a paper published a year and half ago, if that's the correct explanation then why did Tabby send out a Twitter blast to a bunch of observatories, and why did they respond by looking at the star? It's a "family" of exocomets or planetesimal fragments, right? We've known that for a year and half, why redirect all of our telescopes to watch it when it happens again?

Oh, and why isn't that cloud of comets or fragments giving off any IR radiation that would be expected? And, if it's gas, why can't we measure the absorption to figure out which gas it is? You've read the article fully, so I'm sure you know the answers to those.

I did see an article which mentioned that the latest dip in brightness is similar to an event that happened 3 years ago, which is why they are predicting more dips this week. But the real interesting thing about that is, if there is in fact an object orbiting that star at a distance that it takes 3 years to go around, and it's capable of blocking this much of the light, then that object is larger than the star itself. If it was a cloud of dust, it would be radiating the IR that it is absorbing from the star. These are the kinds of things which make this star interesting, and even though you might be satisfied with that year and half old guess, astronomers aren't and they're still looking.

Re:No

[lgw]

Any theory that requires an unlikely series of events to explain the universe we see is a bad theory. The more unlikely, the worse the theory. The theory that life is so unlikely that we're the only place it happened is quite bad indeed.

So far we've found nothing all that special about Earth. Certain composition, certain distance from the right sort of star, that seems to be all it takes.

The unlikely transition seems to be multi-cellular life. Life on Earth started very early, evidence that it isn't that hard. Multi-cellular life to the Cambrian explosion took a while, but its seems evolution was fairly steady, trying out lots of body patterns.

From the Cambrian explosion to intelligent life was again pretty quick (in geological terms), again evidence that it wasn't that hard.

Re: No

[mlyle]

That's actually the whole concept though.

Let's say "we're at the top," and one day in the future we have enough resources for there to simulate a universe for whatever reason, and do so, and it has enough fidelity to simulate another one within, eventually. Of the three universes' dwellers asking themselves "are we in a simiulation?" the answer is "yes" for 2 of them and "no" for 1. This ignores the possibility for branching and deeper nesting.

Now take it one step further, and say "we don't know if we're at the top." We already know that most universes are simulated... how would you bet?

Of course, there's probably a very outermost, "real" reality. But most universes with beings dwelling in them are simulations, so...

Re: No

[silentcoder]

>We have a single instance of intelligent life, some hints that single cellular life is fairly common, and that's it.
We've also found life in every environment we've looked, no matter how inhospitable it seems. Life lives everywhere it can't.
And intelligence is such a generic trick that it has independently evolved multiple times on earth. You mean we have a single example of technologically advanced life, that's not the same thing as intelligent life. Octopi are intelligent life. And I'm prepared to bet the only thing Octopi need to be as technologically advanced as us is the right evolutionary survival pressures and time.

>Throw in the many-worlds hypothesis and multi-cellular life culminating in intelligence may be an event that occurs with a frequency of much less than once per universe, we simply don't have the data to make a meaningful prediction
That's a silly question. The entire universe is setup so life can evolve - it's the inverse of the anthropic principle though - life exists BECAUSE that is the kind of universe this is. But to assume that only once did that universal set of coincidences succeed is to bet on impossible odds. It smacks of religiosity. Even string theory predicts that universes that can support life are an inevitable occurrence.

>Claiming a second instance is a very extraordinary claim.
Claiming that a second instance must be an extraordinary claim is the most extraordinary claim imaginable.

>More than that, a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere in visual range would bring up a lot of awkward questions concerning the Fermi paradox
Forget the Fermi paradox, it's idiotic. The biggest stain on the man's career. For starters - the 'paradox' may not even be true - who says we HAVEN'T found a signal from another civilization ? Odds are if we did we wouldn't have known it - because the chances that their methods of communication are even recognizable as such by us are vanishingly small. Communication develops from biology - we have no reason to assume that another civilization would have senses like hearing or sight or if they do that their communication would be based on that. This being the case for most (not all) earthbound species is a result of the specific conditions on earth favoring them in evolution - nothing about that can be extrapolated. A civilization far more advanced than us could communicate entirely by pheromones - or some process we've never encountered or imagined.

More-over - if this is a Dyson sphere they did NOT happen 'at the same time' - that star is 1300 light years away. That means what we're seeing now was 1300 years ago. There are plenty of starts within 10 light years of us - do you really think we'd head to somewhere 1300 light years away before we do those ? It's quite far enough that they could well have explored nearby stars without ever coming near us. If they are seeing us- they would see virtually no evidence that this planet is inhabited. None of the things we did which may be recognizable evidence of technologically advanced life even EXISTED 1300 years ago. We did most of them in just the last 70 years. Even if they have sufficient technology to peer through our atmosphere - they are watching the VIkings raid England - there is nothing there to make them think we're worth visiting - a primitive, violent species with nothing worth trading.

>Did we just happen to pop up in the same cosmic instant as they finished that structure but before they expanded?
The structure is NOT finished - Observations fit a Dyson sphere under construction - not a completed one. Now it's possible that by now it is done, but that's not what we're seeing. It's just as possible that they went extinct before it was completed. Life is amazingly resilient, species are terrible fragile. Or hell they got halfway and ran out of money - it's happened to some pretty prestigious projects we've done. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
And for all you know - they ARE our ancestors. Cosmic seeding is a legitimate hypotheses.

You give way too much credence to Fermi and not nearly enough to Drake.

Scrith

[MichaelSmith]

Well does it block 40% of all neutrinos?

Re:Scrith

[silentcoder]

Mmm, not sure I agree.
It would take 1300 years for the message to get there.
Lets say there is somebody listening. We won't have any common language. Hell they may not even have anything we would recognize as our primary senses for communication (hearing and sight). There are many other senses (even humans have about 20 of them, we tend to forget that 'sense of ballance' is a sense).
So we need to be on the generous level in how long it takes them to translate the language, even with advanced science they are starting at a major disadvantage. It took about a century to fully translate the Rosetta stone - and that was from earlier languages by members of our own species ! So lets double that. 200 years to figure out the question.
Okay, then they have to send the answer back - which will take another 1300 years.

So that means it will take at least 2800 years to get an answer, and right now we have no idea if one will ever arrive at all !

I'm pretty sure our own Neutrino detection technology will advance fast enough that, by the time we receive those blueprints, they will already be obsolete since we'll have figured it out already. Hell in 2800 we may be busy building our own Dyson Sphere.

Re:Scrith

[silentcoder]

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.

Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Anonymous Coward]

Obligatory Google images link

And not just not, but fuck no.

Re:Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Opportunist]

It it me or does he look like a Bab5 Centauri?

Re:Where's the bad-hair "It was aliens!" dude?

[Samantha Wright]

Joke available in both B5 and Voyager flavours!

Re:Trump 2020!

[Rei]

That glow radiating from his skin ever since he placed his hands upon the orb still seems kind of creepy. Ever since the Invocation opened up the Portals to the Deep, things just haven't felt the same.

Could they?

[Maritz]

Yes.

Are they? Probably not.

Re:Could they?

[sudon't]

For most people, no explanation = God(s). But for a small group of people, no explanation = aliens. You know who you are. Then there is that third group who is willing to admit that we simply don’t know the answer yet, without jumping to extraordinary conclusions.

Re:Could they?

[meta-monkey]

I explain it as aliens made by God.

Re:Could they?

[Solandri]

There's a fourth group you're missing. People who, because there is no evidence of it being caused by aliens or god(s), erroneously conclude that it cannot be aliens or god(s) (or aliens sufficiently technologically advanced to be indistinguishable from gods), and thus "has to be" some sort of natural phenomenon.

No explanation simply means no explanation. Any proffered explanations are merely conjecture, but rejecting those explanations is also conjecture. All are jumping to conclusions. For millennia, rogue waves were dismissed as drunken sailors' tales simply because nobody believed something so extraordinary was possible, and the sailors who experienced them could offer no proof other than their eyewitness testimony. It wasn't until 1995 that we finally managed to record evidence that they really do exist. Further work with the math showed that they are possible (and natural), just extraordinarily rare.

We've got evidence of a new weird, unexpected behavior. We're doing the right thing by trying to study it and collect more data on it (fortunately, this one doesn't change location, making it easy to study). At this stage, rejecting theories and implicitly insulting those suggesting them is the only premature conclusion.

Idiots...

[sjbe]

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.

"Some researchers"? Perhaps as a joke. Trillions of stars out there of immense variety and form and the moment someone sees something they don't recognize immediately it clearly must be an alien superstructure... Sigh... It's like the people who see some lights in the sky they aren't familiar with and immediately forget what the "U" in UFO stands for, instead going straight to deciding it must be alien visitors.

And the proper term for "alien life enthusiasts" is "mentally ill person". These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

Re:Idiots...

[Zocalo]

To be fair, the claims of "aliens" are mostly coming from the media because sensational headlines leads to more readers. What actually happened was that some scientists included the possibility that it could be a Dyson structure in their list of possible explanations for what's going on, stressing that it was unlikely to be the case, and the media ran with it without the emphasis on the last part.

The problem here isn't with the scientists - except in so far as they were naive in their handling of the media - because a good scientist shouldn't discount *any* viable possibility (and a Dyson structure *is* a viable possibility for what's going on, no matter how unlikely) until there is evidence to do so. The problem - as usual - is the media's current bias towards sensationalism over unbiased factual reporting. There's also a world of difference between those who think aliens must be out there somewhere because of the Drake Equation and feel that figuring out a solution to The Great Silence could help us avoid a catastrophe vs. those who jump to unfounded conclusions that LGM as the cause of everything that they can't explain. In practice most (but certainly not all) applicable scientists are going to fall into the former group, but thanks to the media they're tarred with the same brush as those in the latter, with all the problems acquiring funding for potentially useful science that results in.

Re:Idiots...

[Anonymous Coward]

These are people who for whatever reason WANT it to be an alien whatever and who see aliens and conspiracy theories everywhere with no regard to actual evidence. The pattern recognition parts of their brain are stuck in overdrive and no longer function properly because they are disconnected from the rational parts of their brain.

That's weird, I just decoded that same sentence from the digits of PI!

That's because Pi is an irrational number dude!

Re:Idiots...

[meta-monkey]

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

Isn't that this exact scenario? I mean, they're building a wall around a star...

Re:Idiots...

[silentcoder]

>No, but odds are good that it's possible, since intelligence is useful for all kinds of tasks.

Not to mention that intelligence has all the earmarks of an evolutionary universal - a generic trick independently evolved several times. Octopi are as smart as cats - and the rest of the molusc kingdom is mostly things as stupid as clams (literally). Cats and Octopi didn't inherit their brains from a common ancestor (Their last common ancestor didn't have much of a brain) - they developed it independently.

So if intelligence can develop multiple times, independently, that fits the idea that it's so generically useful that evolution will favor it whenever a mutation arises that assists it.

Humans took it a step further, and so far the evidence suggests nothing else has done so except under influence FROM humans (literally - when interacting with us, their brains are pushed to learn to think a bit more like ours) which is to become self-referential. It's not just that we're smart, it's that we can think about WHAT we think, think about HOW we think - and even come up with ways to do it more effectively - that seems to be unique. And we took it one step further yet again. We didn't end at inteligence - we developed EXTELIGENCE, the ability to store our thoughts outside ourselves where they could outlive us. The first tool for this was complex communication: speech, which made it possible to convey our thoughts to others, and store it in their memories. The next step was writing, and so on and so forth until the current peak of exteligence: the internet.
Now these two things appear to be utterly unique to our species. We didn't just learn to use and make tools - but to share those techniques across societies, and allow others to improve on our progress over time. Since, here on earth, that looks like a uniquely human achievement - it's a lot harder to extrapolate that it will have happened elsewhere. At the same time - since it DID happen here at LEAST once - we cannot dismiss the possibility either. The odds of it being possible is 1. It has happened, therefore it is possible.

Re:Idiots...

[lgw]

Life happened quickly, intelligence didn't. However, Intelligence happened quickly after the Cambrian Explosion, so the path from complex multi-cellular life to intelligence seems easy. The journey from life to complex multi-cellular life seems like the hard part, to judge from history.

Answer is no

[andydread]

If it where alien megastructures such as a Dyson type sphere the dimming would more likely be at consistent intervals rather than random intervals which seems to be what's happening here. It's probably interstellar dust/gas of some sort

Re:Answer is no

[Chrontius]

Assuming that it's a single regular ring around the equator of the star, and not a massive constellation of collectors eclipsing each other at seemingly random intervals because that's what was maximally efficient according to both energy capture, and launch costs, while slowly moving into more efficient orbits over the millennia using solar sailing.

It's not like there's no good reason to have anything but a blandly periodic function in a Dyson swarm

Re:Answer is no

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously, it's the debris of an alien megastructure, destroyed in an alien inter-galactic war!

Re:Just ask

[Opportunist]

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.

Re:Just ask

[Zocalo]

Breathing might be a common trait, but breathing generic atmospheres... probably not so much. Much of the life here on Earth has fairly tight tolerances as to the specifics of the environment it exists in to the point that even a fairly small shift in levels of some trace elements would be lethal. Evolution can deal with global changes if they occur over a sufficiently long period time, and migration if the changes are more localised, but the chances of being able to breathe the unmodified atmosphere of another planet - even with a similar mix of primary elements like nitrogen and oxgen, in our case - is *much* slimmer than SciFi usually depicts.

Re:Large and irregular

[110010001000]

Other bodies? like aliens???

Need more than "cannot rule it out yet"

[sjbe]

So are you saying that of the trillions of stars and trillions of habitable planets out there, not one of them has intelligent life on it?

No I'm saying that extraordinary claims require actual proof. Just because we cannot yet conclusively rule out that it is an "alien mega-structure" doesn't mean we should be favoring that as the likely explanation.

As far as I can tell, "aliens" is just one of many explanations brought forth by the authors of the original paper.

At most it should be a "we cannot rule this out conclusively" sort of footnote with copious caveats. Even mentioning it without additional evidence is borderline irresponsible given how crazy people get about such claims.

Unfortunately, many of the more mundane explanations such as dust clouds and massive comet clusters had since been ruled out, so that leaves "aliens" as one of the few remaining viable explanations

Unless ALL of the mundane explanations have been ruled out AND we have more evidence than some mere unexplained dimming, aliens is not a viable explanation. It's simply wishful thinking.

I personally would like to believe there's some cyclic process in the star itself, but I wouldn't rule out aliens just because it "sounds ridiculous".

It's not that it sounds ridiculous (though it does) but rather that there is no actual evidence for it other than an inability to conclusively rule it out.

It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Slicker]

A Dyson sphere, much less a partial Dyson sphere with sporadic orbit makes no sense. Why build such huge things? With technology so advanced, there are plenty other ways to gets lots of energy. They could harvest cosmic rays or put quantum entangled particles inside stars to generate energy from the paired particles. A lot more fissile material must exist in the parts of a solar cluster that failed to ignite.

However, an armada of spacecraft heading straight here from that star would not only dim it, from our perspective, erratically but also dim more and more of it, as it draws near to us. While also highly improbably, I prefer this alternative as it just seems way more exciting.

Re:It's just an Armada Head Straight for Us

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, due to a massive miscalculation of scale, the entire armada was later swallowed by a small dog.

Occam's Razor?

[mi]

I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

Re:Occam's Razor?

[EvilSS]

I am not an astronomer — not even an amateur one — but is "giant alien structure" really the simplest explanation they could come up with?

And how is it different from the "God made it so"?

No, and none of the actual astronomers and other scientists involved with this think it's the most likely answer. In fact most believe it's the least likely answer. However, it is possible based on what has been observed and, of course, the media latched on to that for headlines.

As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.

The good news is that because of all the interest there are a ton of resources looking at it right now so even if it's not an alien superstructure, we will probably learn something new from it.

Oh, another side benefit: When it comes back to be some weird natural phenomenon the tinfoil hat crowd will have another conspiracy about the government suppressing knowledge of an advanced alien race to keep them happy. So win-win-win.

Re:Occam's Razor?

[EvilSS]

As to how it's different from "god made it so": this is testable, that isn't.

If it is that far away from us, I'd say both are equally "testable" in practice...

Not really. One of the reasons they are so excited to see it right now is that they can monitor it as it happens (from our frame of reference at least) and they can watch it through an entire cycle and take a look at the full spectrum of light coming from it. Neither of these were possible last time since it wasn't caught live but found in archived plates as they were planet hunting. By looking at the spectra they can determine quite a bit about the composition of whatever it is blocking the light coming from the star, and they can get more precise data about it by monitoring it more closely.

You want aliens go find the evidence

[sjbe]

Until proven wrong, I say it's Aliens. You can't prove me wrong until you have facts to dispute me

I don't have to prove you wrong. That's not how science works. You don't get to make an unsupported assertion of a positive result and then challenge others to prove you wrong. You made the assertion that it is aliens so you get to be the one to back it up with actual verifiable observations. You have a hypothesis and you get to be the one to run the experiment. For all I know it might be aliens and I'm not saying it is or is not. I'm merely saying that it isn't the most likely among the possible explanations and that we should not favor it until we have better evidence. This doesn't mean I'm ruling out out but merely that the evidence thus far does not even come close to the level needed to support that as a reasonable conclusion.

Zaphod Bebblebrox

[sjbe]

Imagine a situation of Trump's equivalent there President of the Solar System or the like.

I don't have to imagine it because Douglas Adams already wrote about him

Counterexample

[alexo]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Counterexample:
"Trump's budget proposal cuts funding of NASA climate missions and eliminates tax credits to illegal aliens "

Re:Counterexample

[MiniMike]

When the words "NASA" and "alien" appear in the same sentence, the answer is "no".

Counterexample:
"Trump's budget proposal cuts funding of NASA climate missions and eliminates tax credits to illegal aliens "

When the word "Trump" also appears in the sentence, the "no" should be preceded by an "oh ".

Re:Really Old News

[mrthoughtful]

Here's news: ''Synestia'': a new type of planetary object.

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub...

Slashdot is so dead.

Re:Dupe, but not just on /.

[Zocalo]

Blame the media, but it's not entirely a dupe. The actual story here is that Tabby's star has just started to dim again which means that astronomers are scrambling to do more observations, gather more data, and hopefully figure out some alternative possiblities with supporting evidence for what's going on, natural or otherwise. Unfortunately, we're probably going to have to get used to the Tabby's Star / aliens theory cropping up every time this dimming happens because - unlikely as the alien mega-structure theory might be - it generates clicks and, short of an overwhelming amount of evidence for an alternative solution or a reason why it can't possibly be a Dyson structure, it's still bad science to just rule it out.

That's not going help with the lunatic fringe that see aliens everywhere, or if it actually is some kind of Dyson structure (which is currently still a possibility, no matter how unlikely), of course...

It was...

[Ramley]

"The dimming of light you saw in the sky was not a UFO. Swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and reflected the light from Venus. "

Sorry, couldn't help myself... :-)

A no brainer...

[Patent Lover]

Clearly this happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. It's a Death Star.

Re:Citation Meme

[mark-t]

Obviously, but the point of asking for a citation is so that readers can independently evaluate its veracity. It's just part of healthy scientific scepticism. Of course, if we aren't encouraging that on slashdot, then it seems to me that the only remaining solution here is to censor a differing view by downmodding it because one disagrees.

Which I suppose can be effective in terms of an outcome that might feel superficially satisfactory, but isn't at all ideal in terms of actually learning or finding out anything you didn't already know.

Re:Just ask

[hey!]

*Takes deep breath*

Bring it on.

Now try it at 160 kilopascaals partial pressure...

I thought not. Dose makes the poison. Life on Earth evolved to to tolerate, make use of, and in many cases depend on high levels of free O2, but those levels of O2 are a byproduct of life itself. It's conceivable that complex life on other planets could evolve to use some kind of fermentation, although the forms of fermentation familiar on Earth (alcohol and lactic acid) require bound oxygen.

Null hypothesis

[sjbe]

You say it's not "the most likely"? Based on what?

Based on the fact that we've never seen evidence of alien life of any kind ever in any form. Not in the entirety of human history. Furthermore you should familiarize yourself with the concept of a null hypothesis. Proper scientific method is to presume there is no relationship between the observations and the existence of aliens until you can find evidence proving to a high degree of confidence that there is actually a relationship.

We have absolutely NO evidence one way or the other that it's NOT extraterrestrials.

I never claimed otherwise but that doesn't justify making the extraordinary claim that ET must have or even may have built it. The null hypothesis has to be that it is not aliens until we can find evidence to the contrary. To date there is precisely zero evidence for the existence of advanced extra-terrestrial civilizations. Find some and we can revisit this discussion.

You can say absolutely NOTHING concrete one way or the other with NO evidence.

Sure I can. I can say that the null hypothesis remains intact. That is a concrete statement about the evidence. I can also say with absolute certainty that we have never seen any evidence of aliens in human history. As such I can say that my confidence that this is not evidence of aliens is fairly strong. More evidence might move my opinion one direction or the other but there is not a strong case to be made for aliens as the most reasonable explanation at this time.