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Star exhibits strange light patterns which could be a sign of alien activity

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W

Wellscha

Member
Why when we discuss aliens they always have to be "space faring civilization"?

Why can't they be on 1600 AD technology, or for that matter intelligent at all?
 
J

Joe Shlabotnik

Banned
Wellscha said:
Why when we discuss aliens they always have to be "space faring civilization"?

Why can't they be on 1600 AD technology, or for that matter intelligent at all?
Click to expand...

Because we don't have a prayer of detecting any civilization that isn't sufficiently advanced?

And a realistic expectation for discovering life on other planets (Mars etc.) is microbial.
 
D

DarkKyo

Member
Wellscha said:
Why when we discuss aliens they always have to be "space faring civilization"?

Why can't they be on 1600 AD technology, or for that matter intelligent at all?
Click to expand...

Well, in this case it's because an alien civ with 1600 AD grade tech couldn't be causing the fluctuations surrounding this star. Nobody is saying there aren't countless planets in the universe that have intelligent beings with lower technology than us(or extraterrestrial creatures with no intelligence or technology for that matter), they are just not applicable in this specific situation.
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Divvy said:
Sure, but it's not very far from our grasp. We just need to build a web of thin fabric in an unnatural shape, like say a cross or whatever. It would take resources, and we don't really have a good reason for doing this, but it's far more achievable than a Dyson sphere
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I think you're thinking a bit more highly of humanity than I am in terms of our means to pull of a project of that size. Its unfathomable in my opinion considering we have trouble getting into low orbit still and can't get most of our governments to agree on the simplest most straight forward of matters. I just don't see it myself, as a civilization we are nowhere near united enough or have anywhere near the kind of tech to do this. I mean what kind of material would you build this out of that wouldn't be incinerated by the sun and still remain stable enough that the super structure bigger than the Earth wouldnt collapse under its own titanic forces.
 
D

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
HStallion said:
I think you're thinking a bit more highly of humanity than I am in terms of our means to pull of a project of that size. Its unfathomable in my opinion considering we have trouble getting into low orbit still and can't get most of our governments to agree on the simplest most straight forward of matters. I just don't see it myself, as a civilization we are nowhere near united enough or have anywhere near the kind of tech to do this. I mean what kind of material would you build this out of that wouldn't be incinerated by the sun and still remain stable enough that the super structure bigger than the Earth wouldnt collapse under its own titanic forces.
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I strictly meant that we aren't far from the technology and possibly the resources to construct it, and not putting politics or motivation into account. And no it's not possible right now, but maybe in a hundred or two hundred years, it would be within our grasp. Maybe I shouldn't have said "almost right now" but a hundred years or so is a relatively short period of time.
 
U

UFO

Banned
Wellscha said:
Why when we discuss aliens they always have to be "space faring civilization"?

Why can't they be on 1600 AD technology, or for that matter intelligent at all?
Click to expand...

How would we be able to detect a civilization that wasn't putting out massive amounts of radio signals or that had built a machine so large it was affecting it's parent star enough to be detachable 100's of thousands of light years away?
 
H

HStallion

Now what's the next step in your master plan?
Divvy said:
I strictly meant that we aren't far from the technology and possibly the resources to construct it, and not putting politics or motivation into account. And no it's not possible right now, but maybe in a hundred or two hundred years, it would be within our grasp. Maybe I shouldn't have said "almost right now" but a hundred years or so is a relatively short period of time.
Click to expand...

I think it depends what course humanity takes. If we continue to become more of a global community and one that actually gets along and wants to further the species then I do think it would be possible. If we keep on being shitty, selfish and prideful who knows.
 
D

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
HStallion said:
I think it depends what course humanity takes. If we continue to become more of a global community and one that actually gets along and wants to further the species then I do think it would be possible. If we keep on being shitty, selfish and prideful who knows.
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There's still the question of why we would want to. Yes, it's by far the easiest way to signal your existence to the universe, but it's not like we can get a signal back. The only way to communicate is if another civilization built a similar swarm of structures that could rearrange themselves to project a message as it transits in front of the star. But, that would still take tens to potentially thousands of years to reach another civilization, so why bother?
 
I

infinitys_7th

Member
PantherLotus said:
have to admit i'm pretty disappointed by this video. the cloud of comets theory got little more than a hand wave, while there was a bit of blaming the media for jumping on this story -- but then she just kinda hugs up to the dyson sphere theory without pushing back on it at all.
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Comets wouldn't effect observable heat either, I'd think. Wasn't the comet cloud theory rejected anyway?

A megastructure is a perfectly valid possibility, and at the moment all they can do is observe and try to find some meaning.

The lack of heat interests me - if it were a megastructure, what could it suggest?
 
N

Noirulus

Member
If it were an advanced civilization, wouldn't they already be shooting radio signals everywhere for civilizations such as ourselves to pick up?
 
D

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
Noirulus said:
If it were an advanced civilization, wouldn't they already be shooting radio signals everywhere for civilizations such as ourselves to pick up?
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I don't think using a radio "beacon" of sorts is very viable. It would require the detecting civilization to have the advanced technology to detect it at such great distances and it would be very costly energy wise to operate the beacon. Lasers are more easily detected, but would also have very high transmission costs. The transit method of using weird shapes to block out their sun is far more viable and cheaper since it doesn't have any transmission costs, and would only require the detecting civilization to have the equivalent of a Kepler telescope.
 
A

akira28

Member
Divvy said:
It might be aliens even if it isn't a Dyson sphere/swarm. One of the easiest and cost effective ways for a civilization to signal it's existence is to build a large unnaturally shaped screen to periodically block out large portions of their star's light. It's the only way we're able to detect exoplanets at all. Hell, if we really wanted to, we could almost do it right now.
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holy shit...shadow hand puppets. they would totally transmit over large distances using available physics.
 
N

Noirulus

Member
Divvy said:
I don't think using a radio "beacon" of sorts is very viable. It would require the detecting civilization to have the advanced technology to detect it at such great distances and it would be very costly energy wise to operate the beacon. Lasers are more easily detected, but would also have very high transmission costs. The transit method of using weird shapes to block out their sun is far more viable and cheaper since it doesn't have any transmission costs, and would only require the detecting civilization to have the equivalent of a Kepler telescope.
Click to expand...

Ah okay. Yeah I can see radio signals becoming random noise as well. Sadly there's no way for us to confirm that it's intelligent life. :(
 
I

infinitys_7th

Member
Noirulus said:
If it were an advanced civilization, wouldn't they already be shooting radio signals everywhere for civilizations such as ourselves to pick up?
Click to expand...

Not if they decided at some point to switch to fiber optic communications or something similar in their history.

Or they could be using technology we wouldn't be able to understand/interpret, which seems more likely if this is a megastructure. They would be leagues beyond us.

Maybe they mastered the EM drive lol
 
D

Divvy

Canadians burned my passport
Noirulus said:
Ah okay. Yeah I can see radio signals becoming random noise as well. Sadly there's no way for us to confirm that it's intelligent life. :(
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That's why if you're going to make a beacon, a laser that pulses in a distinctive pattern is much better and far easier to detect. The only drawback is that it doesn't travel as far.
 
A

androvsky

Member
Unless I'm missing something, that article is just talking about the long-term dimming. The short term odd dimming that started this whole thing is still unexplained.
 
U

univariate

Banned
Wellscha said:
Why when we discuss aliens they always have to be "space faring civilization"?

Why can't they be on 1600 AD technology, or for that matter intelligent at all?
Click to expand...
It's the same reason why people in 1600 weren't able to successfully communicate with a extraterrestrial civilization. AD 1600 tech isn't going to cut it.
 
F

FelixOrion

Poet Centuriate
androvsky said:
Unless I'm missing something, that article is just talking about the long-term dimming. The short term odd dimming that started this whole thing is still unexplained.
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You're right. It's not necessarily refuting the original 2015 "Where's the Flux?" paper but the 2016 paper from LSU that says its dimming over time. The weird dips that caused it to be singled out in the first place are real.

Phys.org has a great write up on this new paper: http://phys.org/news/2016-05-natural-alien-mystery-star-behavior.html

However, a new study - also accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal - has taken a detailed look at the observations on which the LSU study was based and concluded there is no credible evidence that the brightness of the star been steadily changing over this period.

When the LSU study was posted on the physics preprint server ArXiv, it caught the attention of Vanderbilt doctoral student Michael Lund because it was based on data from a unique resource: Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard. DASCH consists of more than 500,000 photographic glass plates taken by Harvard astronomers between 1885 and 1993, which the university is digitizing. Lund was concerned that the apparent 100-year dimming of Tabby's star might just be the result of observations having been made by a number of different telescopes and cameras that were used during the past century.

Lund convinced his advisor, Professor of Physics and Astronomy Keivan Stassun, and a frequent collaborator, Lehigh University astronomer Joshua Pepper, that the question was worth pursuing. After they began the study, the Vanderbilt/Lehigh group discovered that another team - German amateur astronomer Michael Hippke and NASA Postdoctoral Fellow Daniel Angerhausen - were conducting research along similar lines. So the two teams decided to collaborate on the analysis, which they wrote up and submitted to the Astrophysical Journal.

"Whenever you are doing archival research that combines information from a number of different sources, there are bound to be data precision limits that you must take into account," said Stassun. "In this case, we looked at variations in the brightness of a number of comparable stars in the DASCH database and found that many of them experienced a similar drop in intensity in the 1960's. That indicates the drops were caused by changes in the instrumentation not by changes in the stars' brightness."

Even if aliens are not involved, Tabby's star remains "the most mysterious star in the universe" as Boyajian described it in a TED talk she gave last February.

The planet hunters first detected something unusual in the star's light curve in 2009. They found a 1 percent dip that lasted a week. This is comparable to the signal that would be produced by a Jupiter-sized planet passing in front of the star. But planets produce symmetric dips and the one they found was decidedly asymmetric, like something that would be produced by an irregular-shaped object like a comet.

The light from the star remained steady for two years, then it suddenly took a 15 percent plunge that lasted for a week.

Another two years passed without incident but in 2013 the star began flickering with a complex series of uneven, unnatural looking dips that lasted 100 days. During the deepest of these dips, the intensity of the light coming from the star dropped 20 percent. According to Boyajian it would take an object 1,000 times the area of the Earth transiting the distant star to produce such a dramatic effect.

"The Kepler data contains other cases of irregular dips like these, but never in a swarm like this," said Stassun.

Boyajian and her colleagues considered a number of possible explanations, including variations in the star's output, the aftermath of an Earth/Moon type planetary collision, interstellar clumps of dust passing between the star and earth, and some kind of disruption by the star's apparent dwarf companion. However, none of their scenarios could explain all of the observations. Their best explanation was a giant comet that fragmented into a cascade of thousands of smaller comets. (This hypothesis took a hit when the LSU study was announced because it could not explain a century-long dimming.)

"What does this mean for the mystery? Are there no aliens after all? Probably not! Still, the dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star and we still have no idea what it is!" Hippke summarized.

The Kepler telescope is no longer collecting data in the Cygnus region, but Hippke reports that the mystery has captured the imagination of amateur astronomers around the world so thousands of them are pointing their telescopes at Tabby's star, snapping images and sending them to the American Association of Variable Star Observers in hopes of detecting further dips that will shed new light on this celestial mystery.
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Here's the abstract/PDF for the new paper (accepted for publication in Astrophysical Journal): http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.07314

We present a statistical analysis of the accuracy of the digitized magnitudes of photometric plates on the time scale of decades. In our examination of archival Johnson B photometry from the Harvard DASCH archive, we find a median RMS scatter of lightcurves of order 0.15mag over the range B~9-17 for all calibrations. Slight underlying systematics (trends or flux discontinuities) are on a level of ~<=0.2mag per century (1889-1990) for the majority of constant stars. These historic data can be unambiguously used for processes that happen on scales of magnitudes, and need to be carefully examined in cases approaching the noise floor. The characterization of these limits in photometric stability may guide future studies in their use of plate archives. We explain these limitations for the example case of KIC8462852, which has been claimed to dim by 0.16mag per century, and show that this trend cannot be considered as significant.
Click to expand...
 
S

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
univariate said:
It's the same reason why people in 1600 weren't able to successfully communicate with a extraterrestrial civilization. AD 1600 tech isn't going to cut it.
Click to expand...

Kinda depends on the tech and the "civilization." What if a bunch of sticky snail creatures from a very low grav planet are able to hurl massive amounts of rubble from the surface of their world, that gets caught in the gravitational well of a small but bright star?


We think about everything in anthropomorphic terms.

What if the aliens are a kind of rock eating bacteria that formed in an asteroid belt and like to clump asteroids into coral like formations?

Etc
 
Slayer-33

Slayer-33

Liverpool-2
What a crock of shit, so they want to divert attention off this now? How does this shit compare to other stars? There can't be that many that even dim up like this one right? Where's the full report of this vague hit job by the newly researched "study"?
 
T

TangoAlphaLima

Member
Stinkles said:
Kinda depends on the tech and the "civilization." What if a bunch of sticky snail creatures from a very low grav planet are able to hurl massive amounts of rubble from the surface of their world, that gets caught in the gravitational well of a small but bright star?


We think about everything in anthropomorphic terms.

What if the aliens are a kind of rock eating bacteria that formed in an asteroid belt and like to clump asteroids into coral like formations?

Etc
Click to expand...

I hope these are super early teasers for Halo 6, Frank.
 
G

gutshot

Member
The author of the original paper, Tabby Boyajian, just received funding via Kickstarter to observe the star for a whole year to hopefully watch a dip in real time. This should give us some more info.

This Kickstarter project will secure observing time on a global network of ground-based telescopes so we can catch the star when its brightness dips again. When will the dips occur? What will the dips look like? How long will they last? And last but not least, what is it passing in front of the star to make these dips?

Only with these new data, and the answers to these questions, will we be able to test theories out on what is happening around this star!
Click to expand...

We have initiated observations on the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT). LCOGT is a privately run global telescope network specifically designed for time domain astronomy, meaning that their network of telescopes is positioned strategically around the globe to ensure continuous monitoring of an object.

Our observation plan is as follows. From the 4 years of Kepler data, we know that the dips in the light curve are not periodic, so we need continuous monitoring throughout the year since we cannot predict when it will dip again. We also know that how much the brightness drops is also variable from dip-to-dip. The LCOGT data will not have the precision Kepler had, but will have plenty of sensitivity to detect the observed dips in this star.

What’s more, since we are observing this star from the ground we are also able to tailor our observation plan to reveal detailed information on whatever object(s) are passing in front of the star to make the dips! One way this will be done is by observing the star at different wavelengths, or colors, of light. These new observations will monitor the star’s brightness at an assortment of colors!

In addition to this, the data from the LCOGT are processed in real time, so when data are seen to pass below a brightness threshold, it will trigger more observations in the LCOGT network. Our science team will then alert for observations to be taken at larger facilities to get a better look.
Click to expand...

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/608159144/the-most-mysterious-star-in-the-galaxy
 
E

eyeball_kid

Member
Leondexter said:
As for me, as long as this turns out to be something new, I'll be happy. A star surrounded by tons of dust would be just fine. I just hope it's not instrument error or something like that.
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Unlikely that it's instrument error, otherwise we probably would have seen that in other stars in the Kepler data.

This is exciting, whatever it is, because even if it's not some alien activity, it's a really strange natural event we've never seen before. So there's a mystery to be solved either way.
 
K

Kreuzader

Member
more evidence in the "star's fucking weird" column:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316

gION8Jq.jpg


We obtain accurate relative photometry of KIC 8462852 from the Kepler full frame images, finding that the brightness of KIC 8462852 monotonically decreased over the four years it was observed by Kepler. Over the first ~1000 days, KIC 8462852 faded approximately linearly at a rate of 0.341 +/- 0.041 percent per year, for a total decline of 0.9%. KIC 8462852 then dimmed much more rapidly in the next ~200 days, with its flux dropping by more than 2%. For the final ~200 days of Kepler photometry the magnitude remained approximately constant, although the data are also consistent with the decline rate measured for the first 2.7 yr. Of a sample of 193 nearby comparison stars and 355 stars with similar stellar parameters, 0.6% change brightness at a rate as fast as 0.341 +/- 0.041 percent per year, and none exhibit either the rapid decline by >2% or the cumulative fading by 3% of KIC 8462852. We examine whether the rapid decline could be caused by a cloud of transiting circumstellar material, finding while such a cloud could evade detection in sub-mm observations, the transit ingress and duration cannot be explained by a simple cloud model. Moreover, this model cannot account for the observed longer-term dimming. No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.
Click to expand...
 
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