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Tabby's Star
- quickthrower2 5y agoI like the name “WTF Star”.
- W0lf 5y agoWhich stands for What The Flux, obviously ;-)
- yesenadam 5y agoTED talk: Tabby talks about her star. (2016) https://www.ted.com/talks/tabetha_boyajian_the_most_mysterious_star_in_the_universe https://www.ted.com/talks/tabetha_boyajian_the_most_mysterio... Something massive, with roughly 1,000 times the area of Earth, is blocking the light coming from a distant star known as KIC 8462852, and nobody is quite sure what it is. As astronomer Tabetha Boyajian investigated this perplexing celestial object, a colleague suggested something unusual: Could it be an alien-built megastructure? Such an extraordinary idea would require extraordinary evidence. In this talk, Boyajian gives us a look at how scientists search for and test hypotheses when faced with the unknown.
- mojomark 5y ago"It has also been hypothesized that the changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated with intelligent extraterrestrial life constructing a Dyson swarm; however, further analysis based on data through the end of 2017 showed wavelength-dependent dimming consistent with dust but not an opaque object such as an alien megastructure, which would block all wavelengths of light equally.[17][9][19]" Fun, to think about, and who's to say the Dyson Sphere isn't somehow transluscent, but this sounds like pretty good evidence to my pea brain that we're observing a non-Dyson Sphere object. Definitely exciting candidate target though and I'm happy we keep searching for our celestial cousins.
- intrepidhero 5y agoI was confused by that statement and the sibling comment that a Dyson swarm would block visible light but not IR and Tabby's star seems to dim in IR. So is it dimming all wavelengths or not? Is it dimming some visible (but not all) and IR?
- marcosdumay 5y ago> would block visible light but not IR It would not block some spectrum of IR, probably at the far IR region. Compared to a star, it should probably emit much less near visible IR. It depends on what temperature the aliens prefer, but I wouldn't expect anything similar to a star's emissions. Anyway, there exist telescopes tuned to far IR. I don't know what kind was used on that observation.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoIt's not that it wouldn't block IR from the star. It's that they would radiate waste heat as IR.
- robbomacrae 5y agoUnless the dark forest [0] theory is correct and the Dyson Sphere is designed to look to all intents and purposes like a dust cloud.. (not that it helps us with our discovering). 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dark_Forest
- cletus 5y agoI actually believe that if we detect spacefaring aliens, it will actually be from events like this. There's a lot of thought that has gone into this. Basically, a natural evolution seems to be to build Dyson Swarms. There are lots of reasons for this, most notably the efficiency in creating living area (per unit mass) compared to planets and the "free" energy. A consequence of this is such a megastructure would have high IR emissions. Why? Because in space the only way to cool off is to radiate heat away. That wavelength of that radiated heat is determined by the temperature of the radiating object. For any normal temperature we'd expect to see, that means IR radiation. The Tabby's Star dimmings seem to have the opposite behaviour: very low IR emissions. This is a pretty strong suggestion that it isn't artificial in origin.
- robbomacrae 5y agoForgive me for asking a potentially silly question, but wouldn't the heat dissipating via IR be also seen as wasted energy? I understand that at our current level of physics, to do anything less would involve catastrophic heat build up but I would suspect an alien species capable of building a Dyson Swarm to have access to other means of keeping the temperature stable whilst leaving very little energy to go to waste.
- contravariant 5y agoThere are thermodynamic limits to how efficient solar energy can be. It's almost inevitable that a sizeable portion of the energy will get lost as heat.
- Hallucinaut 5y agoThat may be the case, but why would it radiate on the non-star facing side? Take the JWT for example: no-one looking back at that would see anything higher than -50 degrees Celsius. If the point was to capture energy then anything radiating from the non-star facing side suggests inefficiency. Even if the solar energy has limits, why wouldn't they use waste heat to support, say, plant growth? Not that I think it is a mega-structure, it's just it doesn't strike me as lack of IR emissions as being that informative.
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoI was one of the Kickstarter backers to investigate this further. I got a nice t-shirt and some stickers, but I was just interested in what we would find out. We certainly managed to fund further observations, and rule out some of the theories. Hasn't been any updates for quite a while now though.
- entrep 5y agoAccording to John Michael Godier there is some new data available: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSCN09SSRck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSCN09SSRck
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoVery interesting, thanks! The mystery deepens. More candidate stars showing the same dimming, and all clustered in space around Tabby's star, and of the same stellar types. Doesn't mean aliens, but it's certainly provocative.
- ianai 5y agoI wonder how much of the visible sky it’s affecting from our vantage point. Ie how sure are they that it’s not a near field obstruction?
- MattPalmer1086 5y agoThe video says they would expect other stars to be obscured if the effect wasn't localised to those star systems.
- Certified 5y agoYou will the distribution of current candidates in the sky on page 6 of this paper cited in the video comments [1] [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01208.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.01208.pdf
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- Tabular-Iceberg 5y ago> In December 2018, a search for laser light emissions from Tabby's Star was carried out using the Automated Planet Finder (APF), which is sensitive enough to detect a 24 MW laser at this distance. But why? It’s intriguing, I just wish they could say what the hypothesis was. Alien teens goofing off pointing laser pointers on passing flying saucers?
- jcims 5y agoPresumably attempts to communicate with the earth. If we can see them, they can certainly see us.
- throwawayffffas 5y agoThey almost definitely can't see us. It's 1470 light years away, the light they are seeing now left earth in 650 AD, there wouldn't be much to see, at least assuming the presumed ETs can detect EM transmissions and analyze the earths atmosphere but not directly observe the surface with any appreciable resolution.
- jcims 5y agoThe underlying theory behind the SETI interest is that we are seeing the effects of 'alien megastructures' in orbit around that star. If they can build that, presumably they would be able to build scientific instrumentation to characterize the planet if not directly image it.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoI think his point is more that -- given the speed of light -- it's extremely unlikely that there is anything to see from us in...650AD which is what would be arriving there right now.
- Mountain_Skies 5y agoIs there any reason for our planetary system to attract attention? It's too far away for our radio transmissions to have attracted attention. Not sure there's anything unusual about us that would warrant attention from a distance.
- kilroy123 5y agoSo many mysteries out there. I can't wait until Webb starts beaming back data and is fully operational. I can only imagine what we'll learn from it.
- sandworm101 5y agoCan webb even point at tabby's? Ive never seen a strait answer on this, but i think webb's sunshield arrangement limits it to objects away from the ecliptic, which is fine if you are looking at stuff outside our galaxy.
- entrep 5y agoWebb can 'see' everything but objects between Webb's location and the sun. At each moment, it's limited to part of the sky, but over a whole year, it can observe in all directions.
- pmlamotte 5y agoI've been curious about this as well and decided to look it up; there's a nice video that shows it off fairly well[1]. The sunshield is perpendicular to the light coming from the sun, as is the view from the telescope, though the sunshield is large enough that it can be off several degrees and still keep the telescope in shadow. You can rotate the telescope about that axis and remain perpendicular to the sun allowing a 360 degree view forming a plane. As it orbits around the sun that plane is hitting a different slice of the sky so over the course of 6 months you can view everything. [1] https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/1157-Video https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/videos/1157-Video
- sandworm101 5y agoThat explains the contradictory statements I've seen over the years. The program can view the entire sphere over a period of a year, but at any one moment the telescope only has access to see stars within a particular plane. So it isn't available for ad hoc targeting of interesting things as they happen (nova, transits etc) unless they are in the plane of available options at that moment. That also meshes with the cultural issued behind the scenes. JWST has always been more of an stellar astronomy and cosmology instrument. It won't be much use in looking at closer/moving things like Oumuamua or phenomena like Tabby's star transits that occur at very particular times. So it isn't an instrument for so-called "planetologists", which is the hot field in modern astronomy but was barely a thing when JWST began.
- sydthrowaway 5y ago
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult_science
- BBC-vs-neolibs 5y ago
- globular-toast 5y agoI'd never heard the term "citizen scientist" before. What's really weird is it's apparently a group that includes Darwin and Newton! I would just call them scientists or perhaps amateur scientists/astronomers.
- krylon 5y agoThe term refers to "amateurs" in the sense that they did not study at a university or get a degree. AFAIU, the term "citizen" is preferred because "amateur" these days carries a connotation of "doesn't know what they're doing", while citizen scientists have made (and continue to make) meaningful contributions to astronomy. (Possibly other fields, too, but I don't know one way or the other.)
- kragen 5y agoDarwin and Newton were subjects, not citizens. One of the reasons I hate the "citizen scientist" moniker: it conflates republicanism, a political system for struggle between states, with science, an intellectual endeavor that transcends the boundaries between states and between centuries.
- vondur 5y agoWow, 1470 light years distance. Even at warp 9, it will take over a year to get there!
- NoGravitas 5y agoAt least it's still in the Alpha Quadrant.
- _greim_ 5y agoTangentially related: There's a Vernor Vinge novel called "A Deepness in the Sky" in which a star called OnOff cycles over a multi-year period between normal brightness and emitting no energy at all. Much of the novel has to do with the adaptations of species on the star's planets.
- huhtenberg 5y agoA slow burning sub to go with it - https://old.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/ https://old.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/