What kind of object, how big and how far away, to block twenty percent of the light for eighty days, is that one of these eclipse periods?
Siemion: It is something or some things that are about the size of the star. These are very large objects.
Hoagland: We are talking something that is a million miles in diameter?
Siemion: These are indeed very, very large objects. There were two very significant events in the light curve; one was at an earlier time and one was at the later time. The one at the earlier time, about 800 days into the Kepler mission, is, in and of itself, a very, very strange event. It is asymmetric, it is very deep, it involves a decrease in the flux of the star of about fifteen percent and it appears to be a single monolithic object which has a very, very significant non-spherical character to it that blocks the light from the star very, very slowly over a period of about ten days, and then somehow egresses out of the line of sight between us and the star very, very quickly - in a matter of just a day or two.
The simplest model of it would be something that is shaped like a very narrow triangle. Where as we are watching the star, the point of the triangle passes in front of the star and blocks a little bit of the light, and then very slowly, as the triangle moves across the star, it blocks more and more of the light. Then when the flat-edge of the triangle finally passes out of the line-of-sight between us and the star, there is a dramatic increase in the light of from the star. It happens very, very slowly at first and then a knife-edge at the end.
This is like an isosceles triangle - a very narrow point that passes in front of the star at first and then the larger edge of the triangle passes away from the star. Again, this is a very, very simple model.