"Alien structures" that create the strange twinkling of the famous star Tabby may turn out to be ordinary rings of an ordinary large planet.
In 2015, Tabeta Boyajian and a team of Yale astronomers analyzed data from the Kepler Space Telescope, which searches for distant exoplanets. The spacecraft monitors the brightness of their stars, noting each time the glow fades temporarily and regularly, usually as a planet passes between it and Earth. However, this time, scientists noticed something extremely strange: the star KIC 8462852 twinkled completely unpredictably and completely differently than everything - sometimes stronger, sometimes weaker, and not regularly.
Dozens of hypotheses have been put forward to explain this strange phenomenon, from darkening by an extensive cometary cloud to, of course, the cyclopean structure of a mighty alien civilization, such as the Dyson sphere. Recently, Colombian astrophysicists led by Mario Sucerquia voiced another idea: irregular changes in the brightness of KIC 8462852 can be created by a "ringed" planet similar to our Saturn, but orbiting much closer to the star.
Such a planet is capable of shading a star either by itself, or by its rings, at different angles, allowing it to look stronger or weaker, in a complex and so far uncountable sequence. Scientists write about this in an article presented on the arXiv online preprint service. To test their hypothesis, they modeled the light curve for a gas giant planet with rings, and a star at a distance of about 10 times less than Earth's orbit.
Such calculations were carried out before, but they gave a contradictory result, showing that to create the necessary "effect of unpredictability" a planet with rings must be at least 5 times heavier than Jupiter - almost a brown dwarf. The authors of the new work noted that the gravity of the star in such conditions should act on the rings, making them vibrate and introducing even more unpredictability. According to the estimates of Mario Sukerchia and his colleagues, in this case the planet should have a mass comparable to the mass of Neptune - and this is already quite realistic.
Sergey Vasiliev