Planetologists have found a second star, the brightness of which inexplicably decreases, which indicates the likelihood of the existence of the so-called "Dyson sphere" and the highly developed aliens who built it in its vicinity. Scientists talk about the discovery of the star in an article posted in the electronic library Arxiv.org
In mid-October 2015, astronomers from Yale University spoke about unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, the intensity of which has decreased by almost a quarter in two times in the last 7 years. These "blinks" for the first time indicated the possibility of the presence in its vicinity of the so-called Dyson sphere, a trap of the energy of the star, created by a super-developed civilization of aliens.
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. Subsequently, scientists working with the Kepler telescope confirmed that the brightness of this star is indeed falling.
Signals from the void
A team of German astronomers led by Simone Scaringi of the Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, discovered another similar star, EPIC 204278916, and found a potential explanation for its unusualness by observing the night sky in the southern hemisphere of the Earth with the ALMA microwave radio telescope.
This star is located in the constellation Scorpio, about 400 light-years away from Earth, inside the so-called Scorpio-Centauri OB association. It is a group of about a thousand relatively young and hot stars that were born inside the giant "stellar nursery" about 5-11 million years ago.
EPIC 204278916 is one of the youngest stars in this "family", whose birth has not yet been completed. Its mass is currently about half the size of the Sun, and its brightness is approximately equal to how much light and other forms of electromagnetic radiation our luminary produces.
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According to the Scaringes and his colleagues, they discovered unusual fluctuations in the brightness of this star quite by accident, studying the photographs and data that the Kepler telescope collected in August-November 2014 as part of the K2 mission after its "resurrection".
In these images, scientists have discovered giant fluctuations in the brightness of the new "alien star", during which the strength of its glow in one case decreased by several hours by 65% over 79 days of observations. In addition, the Scaringes and colleagues found other, shorter and larger decreases in brightness, with many of these "eclipses" occurring at the same rate as the star's rotation.
Space gas-dust "pancake"
Intrigued by this unusual phenomenon, scientists began observing EPIC 204278916 with the ALMA telescope, suspecting that such drops in brightness could be caused, as the discoverers of the original "alien star" suggested, swarms of comets or debris from a destroyed planet. This is supported by the fact that EPIC 204278916 is a fairly young star, the formation of planets around which has not yet been completed.
In fact, as these observations showed, a potential source of shading for the light of a young star may not be a man-made Dyson sphere, but a protoplanetary disk that surrounds it like a kind of "donut". We see this donut from the end, so that it remains invisible to infrared telescopes, capable of capturing thermal radiation generated as a result of the friction of dust particles and gas molecules inside this disk.
Gas and dust in this disk are extremely unevenly distributed, and therefore the brightness of the star's light, "piercing" it on its way to Earth, will vary greatly depending on the density of that part of the "donut" that is now looking at us. This may explain why the brightness of EPIC 204278916 changes in a way incomprehensible to us, and why the timing of these decreases is synchronized with the rotation of the star around its axis.
All of this, as the Scaringi points out, does not explain why the original "alien star" falls off in brightness. KIC 8462852, unlike EPIC 204278916, is not a young star and its spectrum does not indicate the presence of a protoplanetary disk or any large accumulations of dust and gas in its vicinity. Apparently, some other mechanism is involved in its tarnishing, which scientists have not yet discovered.
