The merged and improved (?) KIC 8462852 thread

Too tight perhaps?

 

Dude, why would light pollution selectively and consistently affect only one star in the this manner when viewed from a spacecraft that is millions of miles away from the Earth (KST currently trails the Earth by about 100 million miles in a similar orbit)?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kepler_(spacecraft)#Spacecraft_orbit_and_orientation

The same goes for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA), which is in a region on Earth that is notable for its remoteness from population centres.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...b24c7c79757b2!8m2!3d-23.0234342!4d-67.7538335

 

When questions are asked then answers are discovered. You make it sound like someone's htmltion is stupid when you haven't posed the same question to create a list of potentials?

The question is why is there a weird decrease in the light of KIC 8462 and only KIC 8462 seeing as how KIC 8462 is closely located to other stars in its vicinity?

http://www.space.com/34381-planet-with-gigantic-rings-behind-weird-star-eclipses-video.html

The same planet with a gigantic ring network could be responsible for the decrease in light of KIC 8462 and other stars with odd light curves.

 

A little reflection should reveal why a hypothesis is invalid without requiring it to be exposed to a wider audience, who don't have the time or the patience to deal with the constant barrage of what appears to be a random stream of consciousness that most people learn to internalise during childhood. Perhaps you should familiarise yourself with scientific epistemology (for example: http://www2.phy.ilstu.edu/pte/publications/scientific_epistemology.pdf).

If a hypothesis explains the observations and provides numerical predictions that are testable, it will be taken more seriously.

 

http://www.space.com/34303-alien-megastructure-star-strange-dimming-mystery.html

The star's brightness dropped by a surprising 2 percent over the next six months, and stayed level for the final six months of the observation period.
I reading another article that discusses unusual dips in brightness of star J1407. In the video they proposed a gigantic ring orbiting an exoplanet. A ring large enough that could be cleary seen from Earth.
The video also detailed light curves as the planet and its rings passed in front of J1407.
Comets wouldn't be able to cause a continued drop in brightness for six months where the level of brightness stayed the same.
An exoplanet, however, with a large ring of obital bodies, possibly including cometary debris that would heat up or sublimate, would be the overall best theory for what is taking place at KIC 8462852 .
Watch the video paying close attention to 00:23 as the rings pass across the sun and create decreases in the light curve of J1407 and then remain constant at the same leve and then spike. I would have to say that KIC 8462852 is probably experiencing the same reason for dimming that J1407 did which is that a very dense portion of the rings with a lot of rocks packed together around an orbiting planet is passing in front of J1407.
http://www.space.com/34381-planet-with-gigantic-rings-behind-weird-star-eclipses-video.html

 

Glad you solved that finally!

 

The Nobel prize for explaining the dim is in the post. Maybe we can now have some peace.

 

I was reading another article about a planet with a gigantic ring network that if Saturn had the same network could be seen from Earth. I went back and looked at the decrease in the light curve of KIC 8462852 and think that each decrease in light is not a swarm of comets but is in fact a planet with a gigantic ring orbiting it transiting across KIC 8462.
The first two decreases in light are about the same with the remaining three tapering off until the 15% dim. The first five major decreases in light could represent the width and depth of the rings with the smaller dims in between them accouting for smaller and less dense rings.
The 15% dim in light could be a planetary body forming out of the dust and debris of the ring itself. The dims further along in the time line could be a group of planetary bodies forming out of the ring as well where the collected dust and debris would account for the 22% dim of KIC 8462852.
The big question is this. Is there a way to determine the possible width and depth of a single ring orbiting a planet based on the data that Kepler had recorded and how each ring would cause a certain percentage in the dimming of a star?

http://www.space.com/34381-planet-with-gigantic-rings-behind-weird-star-eclipses-video.html

 

Some of the dimming events do look like the passage of a body with a large ring system; others look like the passage of large, non-symmetric bodies with well-defined boundaries. As it stands, there are too many variables and not enough data -- otherwise, the astronomers would already have formulated a small number of tenable hypotheses and be in a position to test their predictions against new observations.

 

It matters which way the rings spin as to how stable they are: http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=33346

Retrograde rings seem to calm down after a bit.

 

So it might still be possible to detect a large ring around a planet that might be causing a decrease in the light curve of the local sun?

New group has begun studying KIC 8452.

http://www.space.com/34501-alien-megastructure-star-being-investigated-by-uc-berkeley-video.html

 

234 stars are claimed to exhibit spectral modulation that could be artificial.

More here: https://seti.berkeley.edu/bl_sdss_seti_2016.pdf

Needs confirmation, of course, and there might well be systematic explanations that don't invoke LGM.

 

Scientists aim largest telescope possible at ‘alien megastructure’ star

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...lescope-possible-at-alien-megastructure-star/

Early Thursday morning, a new and powerful effort was underway to explore a mystery 1,500 light-years away. West Virginia’s Green Bank Telescope was hard at work, sucking up information about a strange winking star.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_reflector

If KIC 8462852 was simply a comet fly-by, Tabby's Star wouldn't be getting this much attention.

 

Green Bank is a radio telescope rather than an optical one like KST and doesn't do any "sucking" (whatever that means). I don't expect Green Bank to detect any signals from LGM (1500ly is probably too far away even for it) but if dimming also takes place at radio wavelengths, it would suggest that any transiting objects are large compared with the wavelength.

 

That would only hold true if we knew it was just comets. We don't know either way. if we did, the mystery would be solved and yes, it would be getting little attention. The reason it gets attention is because it is a mystery.

 

I've heard about laser stars and laser planets:
http://forgetomori.com/2010/science/laser-stars-laser-planets/
http://laserstars.org/amateur/scifi.html#meteor

It might be that naturally occuring lasers could be making optical "signals"

Now here is an interesting imaging opportunity--but for our nearest star:
http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36537

I've often wondered if the WOW signal--if not from a comet as is now thought--might be a signal Earth only got from a focal line. Do a search of "Deep space mission to the solar foci" to see what I mean.

Pass through a focal line--you hear a brief radio burst from another planet that has been lensed--but it dies off as our planet passes out of the focal line.

 

Yeah, natural lasers, masers, and so forth are kind of surprising but it seems there's nothing in the laws of physics to prevent their existence. However, I think the explanation for the latest observations is likely to be data analysis or instrumental error. Microlensing is a possibility for the WOW! signal but it's hard to arrange a repeat performance. Some day we might send deep space probes to exploit the Sun as a gravitational lens for imaging other star systems but such a venture would require significant expenditure, effort and long-term commitment of the same order of magnitude as sending microprobes to nearby stars.

 

It may not be all that bad--remember, other stars can do this--and they have focal lines, not points, so if we pass in front of one--we can use it: http://www.centauri-dreams.org/?p=36537

I'd like to see a map of all these potential focal lines.
http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/92050/do-gravitational-lenses-have-a-focus-point

 

True. Hopefully, someone will perform more observations of events such as the microlensing by Centauri A as your link suggests. However, it's all a bit random as to what gets imaged. To designate interesting targets, we'd need deep-space telescopes.

ETA: A new paper (preprint) on possible causes of the dimming of KIC 8462852 is available:

Families of Plausible Solutions to the Puzzle of Boyajian's Star

Abstract: