The star KIC 8462852 (also called Tabby after the first astronomer to describe it) in the Cygnus constellation has attracted the attention of astronomers around the world for the past few years.
As part of the program for the search for exoplanets, astronomers of the Kepler Space Observatory purposefully searched for stars with variable luminosity - due to the passage of a planet in front of a star, its light fades slightly for a short time, which is repeated at regular intervals. KIC 8462852 was included in this list along with other similar stars, but unlike other stars, its luminosity dropped by a very large amount - about 22%.
In addition, since the speed of movement of planets in their orbits is constant, changes in the brightness of stars must also be strictly periodic. However, this does not happen with the star KIC 8462852 - the periods in its luminosity are unstable and range from 5 to 80 days, which cannot be caused by the darkening from the planet.
A similar circumstance aroused interest in the star Tabby from the side of hunters for extraterrestrial civilizations. The fact is that according to modern views, sooner or later in its development, civilization comes to the moment when it directly begins to use the energy of its star. To do this, she builds the so-called Dyson spheres (they were named after the author of the theory, Freeman Dyson, Freeman John Dyson) - planetary-sized structures that are put into planetary orbits and collect energy from the star as screens. According to calculations, the mass of such a structure should be comparable to the mass of Jupiter.
Since Freeman Dyson's theory of building such spherical hyperconstructions convinced everyone, astronomers enthusiastically began to look for traces of such objects in space. And the star Tabby was one of the first to fit into the scheme - there really is something in orbit around the star and this is not an exoplanet.
NASA's special missions Spitzer and Swift should have shed some light on this mystery. The essence of the missions boiled down to successive measurements of the oscillations of the star's luminosity for each wavelength.
According to a study report published in the Astrophysical Journal, Tabby's star loses luminosity at every wavelength used to measure it. However, the greatest losses occur in the infrared spectrum, which led astronomers to assume the presence of a gas and dust screen around the star.
Promotional video:
Dr Maine, one of the study's authors, puts it this way:
“Only microscopic, finely dispersed screens can scatter starlight in a way that matches the observed measurements. I'm afraid extraterrestrial believers around the world won't be impressed by such a crappy explanation. However, there may still be a technological explanation for this: someone is taking energy from the star using a dust screen. Apparently infrared radiation is more popular with these collectors than others. In any case, we do not yet have clear photographic evidence that the Dyson sphere is there and until there are detailed pictures we can only guess what is there."