The mysterious "alien star" KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus not only mysteriously dims over time, but also periodically increases its brightness, which casts doubt on almost all "natural" explanations for its "blinking", planetologists say in an article posted in the arXiv electronic library. org.
“Until now, we thought that the brightness of a star changes only in one direction - in other words, we thought that it was only dimming. That it actually sometimes brightens after periods of dimming is inconsistent with most current hypotheses,”said Joshua Simon of the Carnegie Institute of Science in Pasadena, USA.
In mid-October 2015, Tabetha Boyajian from Yale University and her colleagues talked about unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, which may indicate the presence of the so-called Dyson sphere, created by an ultra-developed alien civilization, in its vicinity.
Initially, scientists assumed that such a "blinking" of the star could be caused by a swarm of comets that blocked its light from observers on Earth, but in January 2016, the American astronomer Bradley Schaefer discovered that the brightness of KIC 8462852 inexplicably dropped by 0.16 magnitudes over the last century, which called into question this theory.
Initially, a number of skeptics tried to deny the very fact of the tarnishing of KIC 8462852 in the short and long term, but later scientists working with the Kepler telescope, as well as Russian astronomers from the Pulkovo Observatory, confirmed that the brightness of this luminary was declining in the past.
Simon and his colleagues, who have worked with Kepler data in the past, discovered another unusual property of KIC 8462852, analyzing the archives of two other observatories - the ASASSN project, an automated supernova search system, and the ASAS survey, in which scientists continuously monitor the entire night sky more than 10 years.
Access to these two archives allowed scientists to solve two problems at once - to understand how the brightness of KIC 8462852 changed in the long term after Kepler went out of order and began to look at other parts of the sky, and to find out how Tabby's star looked before 2009, when the space telescope was launched.
These observations indicated two interesting things. Firstly, the brightness of the "alien star" continues to fall at the current time, and it has decreased by about 1.5%, an unthinkable value by the standards of astronomy, since February 2015.
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In addition to this, over the past 11 years, KIC 8462852 has gone through two very strange periods when its brightness did not decrease, but increased for quite a long time. This puts an end to all "asteroid" and "planetary" theories about its tarnishing, and imposes severe restrictions on other, more exotic scenarios, such as the collision of moons or planets with a star or the existence of a giant dust ring in its orbit nearly a billion kilometers wide.
What exactly caused these increases in the brightness of the "Tabby Star", scientists do not yet know - for this it is necessary to observe KIC 8462852 in different parts of its spectrum and understand whether it becomes more noticeable in all of them or only in some regions of the visible or infrared radiation.
On the other hand, Simon and his team already now believe that the anomaly they discovered speaks in favor of the fact that the brightness of the “alien star” changes due to complex physical processes in its interior, and not because of some objects in its orbit., whether it's a Dyson sphere or swarms of asteroids. It will be quite easy to check this - if the hypothesis of planetary scientists is correct, then the brightness of KIC 8462852 will increase again in January 2022.
