A team of astronomers Tabitha Boyajan (University of Louisiana) recorded another unexplained brightness change in the star KIC 8462852
On June 11, 2017, astronomers using the TRAPPIST telescope again recorded the change in the brightness of the "Tabi Star" (KIC 8462852). In a blog post, American astronomer Tabetha Boyajian described this phenomenon as "a small but sharp decline." As she herself says about this, "at the beginning this decline - about 1% - could not be confirmed by the data of other observers, since the change was not too significant." However, the next few nights were more fruitful, and the fall in luminosity was recorded in many observatories of the planet, writes the astronomer on the website wherestheflux.com.
The graph shows differences from normal brightness, which exceed the possible measurement errors. The differences are best seen slightly to the left of the 6th day point. Well, the most recent observations clearly indicated a downtrend, which is confirmed not only by astronomers from Louisiana, but also by other observers.
Today Tabitha Boyadzhan, through her FB, informed the world that the change in brightness of KIC 8462852 approached 2%, which means a significant deviation from the norm and, possibly, is the beginning of a new cycle of inexplicable dimming of the “Tabi Star”. And this day was the beginning of another holiday on the street for supporters of the hypothesis of an alien intelligent impact on KIC 8462852.
Strange indicators among the data collected by the Kepler telescope as part of the exoplanet search program, enthusiasts noticed back in May 2009, when the light from one of the stars suddenly and unevenly dimmed for a whole week. The volunteers drew the scientists' attention to this data, and astronomers began observing the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus. In March 2011, the Kepler telescope showed that the star suddenly dimmed by 15%, and in February 2013 by 20%. Each time the brightness decreased unevenly and after a while returned to normal. Explaining what was happening was not easy, given that stars usually lose brightness by only 1%. And when they are blocked from us by a planet the size of Jupiter passing in its orbit. Astronomers realized that what triggers such a reaction in KIC 8462852 must be gigantic.
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Tabitha Boyadzhan from Louisiana State University (USA) led the study, and in 2015 she and her colleagues published a paper on the mysterious signals KIC 8462852. In February 2016, she spoke at TED Talks about the strange behavior of the star and its reasons. In short: astrophysicists don't know exactly what's going on.
Scientists assumed that the star is young, and the light blocks the cloud of substances from which it forms. There was also a version that the brightness was decreasing due to a large cluster of comets around the star. All these theories did not receive proper confirmation - KIC 8462852 had no signs of youth, and thousands of comets also did not give themselves away. However, it was the version of comets that Boyadzhan called the most suitable, but admitted that such a huge cluster of comets around one star is unlikely.
When the story of the star's mysterious "wink" leaked to the press, audiences interested in the topic remembered the Dyson spheres. After all, if one imagined that an alien civilization was able to build such a mega-structure, then its work could trigger the signals of KIC 8462852.
Zaza Osmanov from the Free University of Tbilisi (Georgia) was doing research on this matter. In 2015, he published a paper on Dyson spheres, in which he suggested that it would be more appropriate to build such mega-structures around pulsars - the remains of exploding stars. According to Osmanov, the heart of the star, decomposing after its explosion, is still full of energy, and generously distributes radioactive and X-rays. At the same time, they pass through space from the pulsar in thin jets, like beams of a lighthouse. Therefore, it is easier to assemble them - you do not need to build an entire capsule around the star, but you can do with a smaller structure in the form of a ring around the pulsar.
Tabitha Boyadzhan summed up her 2016 TED Talks by noting that as an astrophysicist, she is the last to bet on the alien version and will continue to research to gather as much information as possible about the phenomenon and find its natural causes. She encouraged all the enthusiasts to join her. And the star KIC 8462852 gave scientists and volunteers another reason to talk about strange signals.
Astronomer Jason Wright of the University of Pennsylvania tweeted on May 19, 2017 that the "star of Tabitha" - as astronomers called KIC 8462852 - began to fade again. He encouraged colleagues and volunteers working with telescopes to obtain its spectrum and publish it.
Meanwhile, Zaza Osmanov literally on the eve of the new "wink" of Tabitha's star - May 11, 2017 - published a new scientific work on the Dyson spheres. In it, the astrophysicist took up the issue of identifying extraterrestrial megastructures. Osmanov calculated that the Very Large Telescope (VLTI) in Chile and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) - NASA's infrared space telescope - could observe nearby pulsars, which means they could help find mega-structures. by infrared radiation - after all, absorbing energy, the structure will heat up.
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DYSON SPHERE
In 1960, American physicist Freeman Dyson took inspiration from Olaf Stapledon's science fiction novel "The Creator of the Stars" and published a paper on huge structures in space.
These things are called "Dyson spheres". The scientist suggested that a spherical shell could be built around the star, which would effectively collect energy and expand living territory. To build a Dyson sphere, the mass of one substance for construction must be approximately the same as the mass of Jupiter, which is 318 times greater than the mass of the Earth. Of course, we ourselves cannot build such a sphere around our star, but some do not exclude that someone else in the Universe could.
Dyson's spheres were remembered mainly by science fiction writers. For example, Stanislav Lem defeated the very idea of mega-construction in the treatise "The Sum of Technologies". The writer explained that such a solution to the space problem of housing would lead to a social catastrophe, and would not give anything good to humanity.
TABITA BOYADZHAN
Susan Boyajan Tabeta (born 1980) is an Armenian American astronomer at Louisiana State University.
She defended her doctoral dissertation at Yale University. Her research interests include astronomical interferometry, stellar spectroscopy, exoplanet research, and high angular resolution astronomy, especially at optical and infrared wavelengths. Tabitha is the lead author of wherestheflux.com, dedicated to the star KIC 8462852, colloquially known as "Tabby's Star", named after her.
Vlad Volkov