Tabby's star is dimming at an incredible rate

Post by david-given » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 9:44 PM UTC

peonicles wrote: post #59

fjarlq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reddit user sigbjoernwilderness's idea is pretty wild... can it be easily ruled out? > Is this the last remaining explanation after Montet/Simon? > The dimming comes from the shadow of a spaceship traveling on an (almost) straight line from KIC8462852 to Earth. The slow continuous dimming results from the increase of the apparent size of the approaching ship while Earth/Kepler is in the penumbra. The irregular dips h…

There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that…

Post by olympusmons » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 9:47 PM UTC

brownbat wrote: post #65

olympusmons wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets brainstorm. Perhaps one mathematical solution to the problem is to score pages based on the average time spent for each article. My hypothesis is that clickbait articles will score very low because the article will attract a lot of clicks from people who are not interested in the actual content but only the headline. In theory, you could do this by deploying a tracker across the web similar to a Google analytics…

There's a plugin for Wikipedia where if you hover over a linked term, it will show the first paragraph from that article, usually all you need. We just need something like that for the web.

Post by Zardoz84 » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 10:08 PM UTC

CamperBob2 wrote: post #62

singularity2001 wrote: post #48

Sunspots, debris and/or a distant cloud are not completely ruled out: https://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316 Wiki: The leading hypothesis, based on a lack of observed infrared light, is that of a swarm of cold, dusty comet fragments in a highly eccentric orbit.[12][13][14] Many small masses in "tight formation" orbiting the star have also been proposed.[9] The changes in brightness could be signs of activity associated wit…

Safe to say that a civilization that can build a Dyson structure isn't using any 20th-century coherent modulation types that SETI could detect. SETI is only useful for catching civilizations in the ~100 Earth year-equivalent span between their development of wireless tech and information theory. There's nothing to listen to but white noise after that.

Post by lnanek2 » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 10:13 PM UTC

david-given wrote: post #71

peonicles wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that…

You just need a big enough ship. A while back I had a plan for a science fiction setting: an inter galactic ship is approach Earth. The people who sent it thought big, and as a result the ship has at its core an enclosed star (a miniature Dyson Sphere) as a gravitational anchor and power source, and round it is orbiting a vast swarm of asteroids and habitats with a few million times the living space of Earth, inside…

Post by sitkack » Sat, Aug 06, 2016, 10:23 PM UTC

Zardoz84 wrote: post #74

erdevs wrote: post #68

Good ol' PV on Kinja (from the linked gizmodo article: http://gizmodo.com/the-so-called-alien-megastructure-just-go... ) has some interesting thoughts, as usual. > The biggest axe against it being an alien megastructure project is the fact its an F-type star. F-types only live a couple billion years, depending on mass. > But the drop in the radiant flux... a sustained drop. That could be something far more interestin…

Spectral type isn't 1-1 correlate with the star estimated life. Depends on the star mass. Our Sun was one time a F type star.