Scientists have a new and well-founded opinion regarding the unusualness of the discovered star KIC 8462852, which excited the entire scientific community for several months due to its "unnatural" luminosity level. Some have even suggested that there may be some alien megastructure near the distant star, blocking its light. However, the latest explanation of astronomers, unlike the previous ones, does not contain any aliens and is based on the results of long-term observation of the star's activity.
Interestingly, the explanation also does not include comets, asteroids and interstellar debris, the suspicion of which fell within the framework of previous assumptions. Instead, the main reason for the unusualness of the star KIC 8462852, according to the latest study, is the phase transition process, which is accompanied by powerful ejections on the surface, blocking the light emission detected by our telescopes. In other words, the study tells us that instead of some external sources that could block the light of this star from us, in fact, this blockage is caused by the internal processes of the star itself.
If you are wondering - and there are some kind of "alien megastructures" here, then we will briefly refresh your memory. In October 2015, scientists discovered unusual behavior in the luminosity of the distant star KIC 8462852. According to the first observations, scientists have never seen such a thing before. As a rule, if there is a planet next to a star, then the brightness of this star will periodically decrease by about 1 percent (at the time of the planet's transit in front of the star), however, observations have shown that the brightness of KIC 8462852 changes by 22 percent with strict periodicity. This news excited the entire scientific community and became the reason for the emergence of many hypotheses and assumptions that some very large object could be located directly around the star, blocking its light.
According to one of the first hypotheses that tried to explain the unusual behavior of KIC 8462852, there may be a swarm of comets near the star, which from time to time reduces its luminosity. This hypothesis was quickly refuted. More recent speculation is that the unusual brightness of a star is the result of a kind of noise or distortion in interstellar space. However, what attracted most of all was the hypothesis of Jason Wright, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania (USA), who made a truly futuristic assumption: the Dyson sphere is located around the star KIC 8462852 - a giant space engineering structure designed to collect the energy of the star.
“Of course, the alien hypothesis should be considered as the last thing, but in this case, everything looks as it would be expected from the engineering level of an alien civilization,” Wright told The Atlantic last year.
At the same time, we did not wait for any sensible explanation in support of the hypothesis of aliens, however, as well as in support of other theories, so the question of the "alien megastructure" remained in the air as though less likely, but at the same time the most interesting of the proposed versions.
A team of scientists from the University of Illinois (USA) says that we could not answer the question because we were looking at the problem from the wrong side. A different perspective may give us a well-grounded answer to the unusual behavior of KIC 8462852. To resolve the issue, the scientists decided to check whether there is a relationship between less strong and stronger changes in the brightness of the star. When the researchers applied a number of mathematical models to their data, they concluded that changes in brightness can be adjusted to the so-called avalanche model. The avalanche model is often used to study a wide variety of natural phenomena, including solar flares, bursts of gamma rays, and even neural activity in the brain. And if from a mathematical point of view everything is very confusing here, in general it allows you to find patterns in those aspectswhere there is some lack of information. Speaking specifically about the variability of the brightness of the star, then, according to this model, there are less strong dips between the strong dips in luminosity, and they directly depend on each other.
The study showed that the observed changes in the brightness of the star coincide with the universal characteristics of the system approaching the critical point of the phase transition observed between solid, liquid and gaseous states of matter and, in rare cases, plasma.
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“An example of such phase transitions is magnetic systems under the influence of a magnetic field, or slow deformation of some material, which, as a rule, is accompanied at first by a quiet sound of deformation (crackling, for example), then develops into a louder sound until the material ultimately does not break completely,”says Karin Damen, one of the scientists involved in the new study.
"The small blackout events noted on our star observation plots are the quiet crackle, and the larger ones are the break."
The phase transition is often observed during the period of solar activity, for example, during flares or solar storms. It is quite possible that non-equilibrium phase transitions of materials occur within the framework of thermodynamic processes inside the star KIC 8462852. And it is this, and not some "alien megastructure" orbiting a star, that is the result of an unusual change in its luminosity.
“Their analysis shows that the avalanche model agrees without problems with actual observations. In other words, the whole mystery may lie in a very strong, but little-studied version of the star's activity, given the periodicity of powerful ejections that cause its darkening. It is quite possible that this is just some type of very rare stars that we have not yet studied much,”astrophysicist Ethan Siegel comments.
Only time and further observations of the star can tell us the correct answer. However, the information at hand also perfectly adjusts to the proposed model. Even if in the end it turns out that the star KIC 8462852 has nothing to do with aliens, we still have a phenomenon that turned out to be unlike anything previously observed.
NIKOLAY KHIZHNYAK