It's not like this is right on our doorstep but I'd still be more comfortable if this was happening more than 1480 light years away.
So we could find out about it even later? :)
Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
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Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#12Would plasma cosmology explain this?
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#13The earth is flat and stationary and all stars are lights in the firmament. This is the truth.
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#14[deleted]
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#15Would plasma cosmology explain this?
Not in the slightest.
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#16> In the meantime, we would remind you that it's very, very unlikely that this strange flickering star has anything to do with aliens (and is even more exciting if it doesn't - because, hello new space phenomena!). I think aliens would be a little bit more exciting... Might just be me though.
that headline though ?, online journalism at its worst, the chase for clicks, there really needs to be some solution to this problem journalism is dying and clickbait is where is at.
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#17Could an astronomer weigh in as to why the dimming effect isn't due to a 'rogue' blackhole entering orbit with the star and both blocking light and draining material from the star? I haven't seen that hypothesis dismissed yet.
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Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#18Two reddit discussion that might be able to answer some questions we have here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper...
https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...
They also contain links to the resulting paper itself
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#19Could an astronomer weigh in as to why the dimming effect isn't due to a 'rogue' blackhole entering orbit with the star and both blocking light and draining material from the star? I haven't seen that hypothesis dismissed yet.
Not entirely sure why, but I suspect because they haven't been able to determine if there's any lensing going on of the star that you'd expect to see if something like that entered the system. But I do believe that they'd see higher energy (x-ray, gamma?) bursts if it was removing material from the star which would lead to a different kind of variability. We know roughly what that should look like because of other bi…
There wouldn't be any observed lensing because you have to be the right distance between the lens and the source for that to be observed. (For objects of comparable mass, the lens has to be roughly halfway in between the source and the observer) But if there were a black hole accreting matter from the host star, there would be an accretion disk which would be visible in X-ray.
A black hole is also too small to explain the drop in brightness. That would require something planet-sized, but a black hole is only about the size of a city.
Re: Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate
#20It's not like this is right on our doorstep but I'd still be more comfortable if this was happening more than 1480 light years away.
Well whatever it is, we probably have 1000+ years to save ourselves right? If whatever caused it comes at us at 50% light speed, which sounds unlikely given how fast that already is, we'd still have 700 years.
I'm pretty sure that if human's resources were suddenly all turned towards getting the hell out of here, we could certainly pull it off for a good part of the population in a few hundred years. Whether we'd eventually survive, after decades or centuries in space (before we manage to find and arrive at a new planet, if any), is something I'm less certain about, but I'd still estimate the odds to be fairly okay, especially with 1000+ years to prepare.