The merged and improved (?) KIC 8462852 thread

[Dryson]

Yeah, that link doesn't work for me either. Here's a link to the abstract from the Monthly Notices of the RAS:

VVV-WIT-08: the giant star that blinked | Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society | Oxford Academic (oup.com)
Apparently, several such objects have been observed. The suggestion is that the occulting object might be an optically opaque disc around a second star orbiting the first.

ETA: Found the preprint:
2106.05300.pdf (arxiv.org)

Have other stars in the same location of VVV-WIT-08 been determined to be close enough to orbit VVV-WIT-08?

Most likely the case as a Jupiter or even a Super Gas Giant orbiting the star might not register as a dip in the light curve from 23,000 light years away.

At that range, there would be a lot of other objects to think about first, rogue planets or large rogue asteroid fields passing across the stars line of sight to Earth where the object could be 15,000 light years away. But if rogue celestial objects were the cause, then the dip wouldn't repeat itself.

If the object causing the dip in the light curve of VVV-WIT-08 is a planet, most likely a Super Gas Giant, then the planet would be at a distance of somewhere between the distance that Jupiter and Saturn are from our own Sun. The dip of VVV-WIT-08 happens once every 17 years, meaning that the object has taken 17 years to make one full revolution around VVV-WIT-08. Jupiter takes 12 years from any transit point to return to that point.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

I suggest reading the paper to find answers. It's pretty comprehensive in its discussion of the likely scenarios apart from LGM.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

Bump - KIC 8462852 continues to act weird in ways that are hard to explain as being natural phenomena.

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Particularly intriguing is that coherent light was possibly observed as though a powerful laser had been pointed in our direction. However, this has now been excluded as due to cosmic rays interacting with the detector or other naturally occurring causes. If it reoccurs though and can't be explained away, it's probably aliens.

[1812.10161] The Breakthrough Listen Search for Intelligent Life: Searching Boyajian's Star for Laser Line Emission (arxiv.org)

 

[publiusr]

Forgettomori had a page called laser stars and laser planets…one sub link suggested you could get a laser beam out of the sun with an asteroid strike…not a grazing hit along the limb but full on leaving a nice plasma tube as a landing medium…or something…

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

It's unlikely that we would see such an event just at the very time we happened to be looking for coherent light from KIC 8462852 (Boyajian’s Star). We'd also expect to see such events when looking at other stars at random. In this case, the false positives were ascribed to other effects but, apparently, such events have not been detected from other stars that they examined.

Natural masers can exist, for example, 169 µm wavelength, terahertz radiation from hot dusty gas energised by UV light from a hot, luminous young star:

Natural laser discovered in space | Laser Focus World

However, the top candidates from the Boyajian’s Star survey had wavelengths from 589 nm to 851 nm (orange to near infra-red). The two candidates with the highest signal-to-noise ratio had almost exactly the same wavelength at 636.5 nm (red). Boyajian’s Star is also a Main Sequence F-type star and not a young star. It does not exhibit the infra-red signature that would indicate a circumstellar dust disk.

As for the mechanism you mention, I'd need a reference. It doesn't sound a credible way of producing coherent radiation as that requires specific conditions. A laser needs:

• a suitable gain medium in which it is possible to create a population inversion among electrons that are occupying the available energy states
• a source of energy to excite electrons into these states
• a mechanism to provide optical feedback and amplify the output preferentially at the lasing frequency - usually a reflecting optical cavity

At light frequencies, it's hard for me to imagine ways that all three conditions can occur naturally in the same place and time. At longer frequencies, microwave and thereabouts, we know that nature has found ways to satisfy the first two conditions. It might just be I don't have a good imagination.

Maser - Wikipedia

An astrophysical maser doesn't have an optical cavity and its emission passes once through the gain medium. It does not exhibit the spatial coherence and mode purity in wavelength and phase that you would expect from a laboratory maser. That's how we should be able to distinguish between naturally and artificially produced coherent radiation. Of course, nature might still have ways to fool us...

 

[publiusr]

It’s good at that..LGM pulsars and such.

 

[Asbo Zaprudder]

More about the periodicity of the dimming:

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Why we shouldn't rule out an ET explanation such as stellar-lifting operations to extend the lifespan of a star.