Perhaps the wandering star Tabby is surrounded by an energy-draining alien superstructure. Or maybe she just swallowed the planet. The star, formally known as KIC 8462852, has puzzled scientists with its rapid and chaotic loss of brightness. During 100 days of observing it, the Kepler telescope recorded a darkening of the star dozens of times, while once it darkened immediately by 22%.
This mysterious, almost inexplicable from the point of view of modern science, the behavior of the luminary puzzled everyone. If we exclude less fascinating hypotheses, such as the cloud of interstellar dust that covered the star, astronomers are left with only assumptions about the directional activity of some extraterrestrial life form. In theory, advanced (much more advanced than terrestrial) civilizations could build a Dyson sphere around Tabby. A similar concept was developed by physicist Freeman Dyson back in the 1960s. This superstructure could hypothetically surround the entire star and absorb its energy to provide, say, production capacity. A single star can power a colossal number of space factories or huge interplanetary cruisers.
New research, yet to be published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, suggests that the star-planet collision is most likely to blame. This hypothesis may explain not only the strong fluctuations in brightness, but also why the star has been darkened over the past century. It seems strange that a spectacular collision of a planet with a star would darken the latter, but sooner or later the star must return to its previous state. Ken Shen, an astronomer at the University of California at Berkeley and author of the study, spoke about this.
Numerous cases of blackout of KC 8462852, however, can be explained by another hypothesis: clouds of space debris that revolve around the star and periodically make it dimmer for an observer from Earth. But if we accept the theory with the planet, then, according to another author, Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University, the star could simply rip off the mantle of a rocky, Earth-like planet, which would leave a trail of chaotic pieces of rock with a mass of the Moon in outer space. as well as gas clouds. These clouds cause Tabby to darken while she devours the planet's core. There are other scenarios for what happened, for example, that a massive planet the size of Jupiter came too close to the star, which caused its moons to de-orbit and, again, left a lot of space debris in the star's orbit.
But what could have caused the disaster? At a distance of 1000 AU (1000 distances from the Earth to the Sun, which is a small distance by cosmic standards) Tabby may have a companion star, about half the size. "It is possible that this outer star periodically bombards its neighbor with planets when they are attracted to it by gravity," Metzger suggests.
A Dyson sphere or any other similar man-made object is also a working hypothesis. According to astronomers, such anomalous behavior of a star may not be so uncommon on the scale of space: the Kepler telescope observes only 100,000 stars in a relatively small part of the sky, but knowing that many millions of stars are hidden in the depths of space, we can assume that in In the future, more powerful telescopes will be able to repeatedly see such changes in brightness - then it will be possible to draw up any specific theories. Otherwise, Metzger jokes, one can simply assume that right now thousands of civilizations are drawing energy from the stars, while earthlings continue to destroy only their own tiny planet.
Vasily Makarov