5 ms·
> The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything
by HenryKissinger 5y ago
> The brightness of the object also varies dramatically, by a factor of 100, and the signal switches on and off apparently at random. We've never seen anything like it."
A signal-emitting star being temporarily obscured by massive objects passing close enough to block the signal in our direction, or smaller objects at a further distance? Asteroids? Planets? Other stars? Dwarf stars? Maybe it's a crowded system, which may look like randomness.
If I'm standing on one side of a busy road with a lamp aimed at you and you're on the other side observing the light, the seemingly random passage of vehicles will make the signal look random.
- jiocrag 5y agoDyson sphere.
- sneak 5y agoI don't think that explains the rotating polarization.
- HenryKissinger 5y agoMaybe the source's rotation axis is responsible for this.
- eurasiantiger 5y agoIt would have to be spinning pretty darn fast to affect polarization of light in a detectable way.
- willvarfar 5y agoWould these bodies cause detectable lensing?
- Tenoke 5y agoTraffic doesn't look random - you'd quickly note patterns in it. Ditto for movements of celestial objects.
- sosborn 5y agoDoes that hold true for something so far away? The number of objects that might pass through our line of vision only once during our life time seems as if it would uncountable.
- lrem 5y agoThe thing about outer space is that it's impressively empty. Any objects obscuring a visible star are most likely in its system. So, even for something this far away in a crowded system, we should be able to tell in a couple decades.
- sosborn 5y agoDoesn’t this ignore the vast number of systems between us and the visible star?
- lrem 5y agoIt doesn't. Imagine the night sky. What do you see? I see stars, that are bright dots on black background. That is, to a first approximation the overwhelming fraction of the area of the sky actually doesn't actually have a star. Now, the obvious error in that is the Milky Way, which is kind of a faint bright smudge. The non obvious error is that some things I see as stars really aren't. In both cases you can get a telescope and see that, upon closer inspection, this is actually a bunch of stars on black background, that were close enough to seem to be one star, or a smudge. As you point ever stronger telescopes at those, you discover that many smudges and stars are in fact bunch of individual stars (but some stars are actually singular stars and some smudges are nebulas). More annoyingly, when you point those telescopes at the black background, you notice more individual stars on black background. Now, you'd think you know the pattern and can do it ad infinitum. But you can't, because at some point the black background is resolved to the point of, well, the background radiation at the edge of the visible universe. And some of the bright dots turn out to be dense clusters and galaxy cores, where we can't make out individual stars. But, as far as I understood, we have catalogued tens of millions of stars we have a clear view of. And when something passes between our system and a visible star, it's often (usually?) an exoplanet in that star's system, of which we've discovered almost five thousand.
- cantbudgeit 5y agoI wonder if it is some sort of variation on a double pendulum problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_pendulum Where the system is very chaotic and incredibly hard to model, so it appears to be random. Perhaps this is a complicated multi star system that contains a pulsar and the complex orbits are creating these seemingly random flashes of light.
- mig39 5y agoSee also The Three-Body Problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-body_problem And it's also the name of a great book that might be appropriate here... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)
- varjag 5y agoThe light is polarized, as I understand that very much excludes an ordinary star in such a system.