{"id":19242,"date":"2016-09-16T19:18:52","date_gmt":"2016-09-16T11:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/astronomers-round-up-the-unusual-suspects-for-alien-megastructure-star\/"},"modified":"2016-09-16T19:18:52","modified_gmt":"2016-09-16T11:18:52","slug":"astronomers-round-up-the-unusual-suspects-for-alien-megastructure-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/astronomers-round-up-the-unusual-suspects-for-alien-megastructure-star\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers round up the unusual suspects for \u2018alien megastructure\u2019 star"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_214149\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-214149\" style=\"width: 620px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full-width wp-image-214149\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/151125-comet-620x349.jpg\" alt=\"Comet storm, not alien megastructures\" width=\"620\" height=\"349\" srcset=\"https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/151125-comet-620x349.jpg 620w, https:\/\/cdn.geekwire.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/151125-comet.jpg 1133w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\"><figcaption data-nosnippet=\"\" id=\"caption-attachment-214149\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This illustration shows a star behind a shattered comet. (Credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>That mysterious \u201calien megastructure\u201d star is still a mystery, but the most plausible explanations appear to be dense patches of interstellar gas or dust that just happened to pass in front of the star.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s the upshot of analyses conducted by the astronomer who first raised the idea of an extraterrestrial construction project a year ago.<\/p>\n<p>In the Astrophysical Journal Letters, Penn State\u2019s Jason Wright and a co-author, Steinn Sigurdsson, run through a wide range of hypotheses for the behavior of a star called KIC 8462852, also known as Boyajian\u2019s Star or Tabby\u2019s Star.<\/p>\n<p>Not even the alien hypothesis is ignored.<\/p>\n<p>The mystery has to do with a strange pattern of erratic dimming and brightening that was observed by NASA\u2019s Kepler space telescope.&nbsp;That pattern was noted last September in a study&nbsp;with&nbsp;Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian as principal author. (Hence the star\u2019s nickname.)<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"The most mysterious star in the universe | Tabetha Boyajian\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/gypAjPp6eps?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen=\"\" data-ratio=\"0.5625\" data-width=\"800\" data-height=\"450\" style=\"display: block; margin: 0px; width: 800px; height: 450px;\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Wright suggested that the dimming could theoretically be caused by shifts in an alien megastructure surrounding the star&nbsp;\u2013 perhaps a giant&nbsp;energy-generating Dyson sphere&nbsp;built by an advanced civilization.<\/p>\n<p>Later studies reported that the star, which is located 1,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus, had undergone other long-term dips in brightness.<\/p>\n<p>Is it aliens? Wright says the idea is \u201cnot completely ruled out, yet\u201d but \u201cvery unlikely.\u201d In their latest study, Wright and Sigurdsson say stellar observations from the European Space Agency\u2019s Gaia satellite could definitively rule out the alien hypothesis or keep it alive.<\/p>\n<p>Many other explanations have been proposed for the observations of Boyajian\u2019s Star, including variability in the star, or swarms of comets passing in front of it. But Wright and Sigurdsson favor a scenario in which small-scale density variations crop up in the interstellar medium between us and the star.<\/p>\n<p>Those types of variations&nbsp;\u2013 for example, short-lived patches of gas and dust, or small molecular clouds&nbsp;\u2013 would have to be rare. \u201cBut it turns out rare dense patches <em>are<\/em> a thing!\u201d Wright says.<\/p>\n<p>Future observations, either of repeated dimming patterns at Boyajian\u2019s Star or of similar dimming by other stars, would lend additional support to this hypothesis. The comet swarm hypothesis is also still in the running, plausibility-wise.<\/p>\n<p>For what it\u2019s worth, there\u2019s talk about even more dramatic patterns of irregular dimming&nbsp;that have been observed in a star called EPIC 204278916.<\/p>\n<p>The observations from Kepler\u2019s K2 mission were reported in a paper&nbsp;published last month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The&nbsp;study&nbsp;could bring additional perspective to the debate over Boyajian\u2019s Star.<\/p>\n<p><em>To get the rundown on the full range of hypotheses for Boyajian\u2019s Star, including black holes, check out the research paper as well as the AAS Nova update and Wright\u2019s analysis on his AstroWright blog.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This illustration shows a star behind a shattered comet. (Credit: NASA \/ JPL-Caltech) That mysterious \u201calien megastructure\u201d star is still a mystery, but the most plausible explanations appear to be dense patches of interstellar gas or dust that just happened to pass in front of the star. That\u2019s the upshot of analyses conducted by the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4666,1661,3226,2826,5286],"class_list":["post-19242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-alien-megastructure","tag-astronomy","tag-gaia","tag-kepler","tag-kic-8462852"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19242"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}