KIC 8462852: The Plot Thickens

this is an update in my continuing coverage of the mysterious star ksc8462852 or tabby star or more correctly boyajian's star for september of 2021 a blast from the past to be sure to say those words again long time listeners will remember that my very first video was on this star and then the story died down and it appeared to be a phenomenon of dust but guess what it's back to behaving inexplicably this channel has gained several hundred thousand subscribers since those days when the story was hot so i'll start with a rundown of what happened with a star and then we'll get to the current new developments surrounding it in 2011 the kepler spacecraft recorded data on thousands of stars within a very specific and tiny field of view within the constellation of cygnus kepler was a photometer meaning that it measured the brightness of stars looking for tiny dips in light that indicated that an exoplanet had passed in front of its parent star thousands of exoplanets were found using this method making for a resoundingly successful mission for kepler but it also collected an absolute mountain of other data requiring the help of amateurs known as the planet hunters to comb through light curves looking for transits this citizen science program was also quite successful alerting scientists to the presence of many exoplanets but there were also anomalies spotted by the planet hunters and one of these was the star kic 8462852 it's worth noting here that the reason that this star has a phone number is because kic stands for kepler input catalog and was compiled for the mission but in fact actually catalogued significantly more stars than the spacecraft could see so tabby's star is number 8462a in that catalog it's also worth noting that automated searches of potential exoplanet transits actually threw the light curve of the star out only through a second human search of the data was this found the light curve of the star was so strange showing dips of up to 22 percent of the star's light the natural origin explanations that were advanced to explain it all fell short opening the discussion up to the alien option that we were in fact seeing gigantic alien megastructures transiting the star the light curves were such that if such things existed then that's what they would look like to the kepler spacecraft and its capabilities and there were bizarre features in the light curves that added to the mystery including one very defined clear feature at day 792 in the data that could have been interpreted as a gigantic isosceles triangle passing in front of the star while nature can produce such shapes such as a comet it in itself was strange it would have had to have been a comet knocked backwards to fit which isn't impossible but seemed odd even more so since it seems that a messy dust cloud did it but a further paper released later on exo-comets showed that they did not look like this in the kepler light curves and had a characteristic light curve profile of their own which is interesting in itself that the kepler spacecraft was able to detect exocomets around other stars all of this ticked a box in the astrobiology field because of an idea first advanced by astronomer luke arnold arnold's idea was that a cheap form of announcing your presence to others in the galaxy is by creating huge baffles of sorts perhaps made of something like mylar in a distinctive shape that way alien scientists with their own kepler-like detectors might see it and know that such a shape would not naturally occur this could come in the form of triangles squares or even louvers that could be put in orbit of a star and the light output could be varied in a distinct and unnatural way with kic8462852 presenting such a weird shape this possibility was tantalizing to say the least but it all came to an end with further ground observations of the star dr boyajian and her team were able to continue studying the star through a kickstarter campaign and continue to do so to this day they obtained observations that showed that the light was being blocked unevenly at different wavelengths meaning that the culprit had to be extremely fine dust something less than particles of smoke a solid megastructure on the other hand would block light out completely taking that potential off the table but there's another mystery here measurements were taken to see if the star system was emitting an excess of infrared light this is because dust such as a protoplanetary disk will absorb the light coming from its star and then re-emit it as infrared light in other words warm dust but no such signature was found at the star so that may mean that either the dust is very cold or somehow below the threshold for infrared detection but not for visual detection this led to the hypothesis by dr boyajian and team that this may be a case of cold comets disintegrating around the star but even that was not a perfect fit and now seems even less likely other options included dust in the interstellar medium but that didn't quite fit either and definitely doesn't seem to fit now another was it could be the star itself varying in brightness in a way we've never seen before such as perhaps giant sunspots but this did not pan out either all explanations failed to explain this weird juxtaposition of dust around the star but that's not the only aspect of strangeness here the dust seems to be getting dustier it was found that not only was kic 8462852 experiencing transient dips in its light curve but multiple photographic sky surveys stretching over the last hundred years have shown that the star is gradually dimming overall this is odd in itself stars can dim on their own such as what betelgeuse did last year when it apparently belched out a huge dust cloud but tabby's star is a type f main sequence star which aren't known for that kind of behavior so with the dust dimming it then the amount of dust must be increasing or at least appear to with measurable effects over a period of centuries this is weird since such a process would be expected to take far longer nature likes to work on geologic time scales for things like this not human lifetime time scales and there were plenty of other oddities including a team looking for steady laser signals making only one detection and it happened to be kic kic-8462852 this was dismissed as probably being just an errant cosmic ray entering the detectors and no signals in radio were detected but it was an odd coincidence indeed since the kepler data was taken and post 2015 when the star's activity was discovered more data has been collected by both amateurs and professional observers and there have been multiple subsequent dimming events at the star including very short-term dips being seen over the last few weeks after a period of quiet this brings into the equation the question of periodicity are the dust clouds in orbit of the star passing by repeatedly as they orbit there was some initial suggestion for this advanced by boyajian but it was only ever a hint of periodicity this may now have changed as more data has been collected in a paper by gary sacco and colleagues link in the description below they predict a 1574 day or 4.31 year period to whatever is orbiting tabby's star this is interesting because that would place the material within the habitable zone of the star at a distance of just under three astronomical units and further deepen the mystery of why no infrared was observed that close to an f-type star would mean there should be obvious infrared radiation there isn't and then there is the question of how the dust is being generated given its size and the type of star the dust should be blown out of the star system by solar wind very rapidly manner of weeks so whatever is creating the dust must be replenishing it at a rate higher than what's being blown out allowing for the overall long-term dimming effect it's difficult to envision a process for how that could occur without invoking implausible natural explanations and that leads us to the next strange attribute of the star voyaging and colleagues noted within the star's light curve that the dips exhibited a separation of multiples of 24.2 days this is held as a periodicity of 1574 days is 65 periods of 24.2 days spooky indeed and this starts looking a bit technological as in some kind of techno signature so what might be going on here here is where i make a caveat this is high speculation and i am a science fiction author not a scientist so i can step a bit further than they can but this is also highly unlikely and what we are seeing is probably just some coincidence of natural origin even though the coincidences continue to stack up but since this star continues to throw curveballs it's fun to speculate this might be what some kind of alien asteroid mining operation under very efficient and controlled conditions might look like arranging asteroids for efficient mining might create a pattern like what was observed and sub-micron dust might simply be tailings from the mining if your tailings are so small that they get blown out of the star system from solar wind then that's a good way to both get rid of your waste but also extract every bit of material that you wish to from your mining say metals are your goal it's hard to say what an alien civilization's mining capabilities are but there are many reasons why they might mine asteroids firstly it's easier to extract raw materials from an asteroid than it is a planet this is because asteroids can be richer sources of metals like gold that tend to sink down into planets during their formations in fact most of earth's surface gold was deposited by asteroids and all the native gold that it had during formation sunk to the coral when everything was molten secondly it makes no sense if you want raw materials to go through the trouble of extracting them from a planet's gravity well and shooting them up to space at great expense when you have plenty of asteroids richer in the materials that are much more easily accessible this is becoming relevant to us there have been ideas floated that it may now be profitable to mine asteroids for platinum group metals but where asteroid mining becomes essential is when we start building large structures in space such as o'neill cylinders if you build cities in space launching the materials from earth becomes costly pretty quickly even with plummeting launch costs in comparison to just getting the same materials from an asteroid at some point asteroid mining is our future that's also likely to be the case for space-faring aliens this is especially important in the idea of self-replicating probes that use raw materials they gain from star systems to reproduce and colonize the galaxy much like earth life does we are essentially biological von neumann probes using this method could result in the entire galaxy being colonized or at least have a probe stationed in it within every star system in only a few million years at sublight speeds the galaxy is only about a hundred thousand light years across and self-repairing machines aren't as sensitive to the passage of time as short-lived biological humans but asteroid mining falls short on one major point heat we should see the tailings glowing wildly and infrared and we do not so another option presents itself that of mining a star itself this is known as stellar lifting and essentially what happens is the advanced civilization magnetically lifts material from the surface of a star lets it cool and then mines it for useful materials stars are actually good sources for raw materials and often contain all manner of elements the waste from this process could potentially explain the behavior of tabby's star it's unknown what the eventual outcome of all of this is if the star continues its long-term dimming trend then do we eventually come to a point of full extinction will the star simply blink out that in itself is a method of seti looking for things that appear or disappear inexplicably in photographic plates because nature tends not to do things like this with stars without something dramatic happening like a supernova since the story broke there have been other stars that at least superficially present light curves like kic8462852 but not exactly and in fact two examples of oddly behaving stars that may outdo tabby's star have come to light the first of these is the star hd139139 which presents a light curve where numerous repeating transits like exoplanets was observed the weird thing here is that there were too many of them and all of the dips except two were all roughly the same size meaning that the objects were all the same size except two which were twice the size of the rest what's going on there remains a mystery the other is a star doing something somewhat similar to kic8462852 but in a much more dramatic way this is the star vvv wit08 and the stars seeing dimming events on a much greater scale than kic in that up to 97 percent of the star's light being blocked during a dip further this star passes the megastructure test that ksc did not in that whatever is blocking the light is optically thick and looks like a solid object there could also be very thick dust clouds blocking all frequencies of light from the star it seems unlikely that we'll have answers on these bizarre stars anytime soon kic-8460 has been in the discussion since 2015 and six years later it's still a curveball throwing mystery even with more observations and data and the story seems likely to get increasingly weirder as more observations come in especially if there is an alien civilization involved in any of these cases to arrive at a confident conclusion that we have unambiguously detected an alien techno signature is going to involve all sorts of weird results from observations and it's worth saying that we don't know everything that can happen in star systems and we learn something new about the subject all the time we may simply not have thought of a viable natural explanation yet but that doesn't mean there isn't one but it is a fun thought exercise to speculate about the possibility of a distant alien civilization mining a star for materials 1500 years in the past during the days of the fall of the western roman empire what that civilization has done to that star in the meantime is anyone's guess we simply have to watch and wait for the next 1500 years to find out which by that time we might be doing the same thing to stars thanks for listening i am futurist and science fiction author john michael gautier currently reminiscing the first video i ever posted on this channel was about kic kic8462852 and i was expecting maybe a few hundred views and maybe sell a book or two obviously i underestimated that and it's been a whirlwind of two channels growing far bigger than i ever expected there's been many things including beautiful fan art and even a song written about me by snakes have legs link in the description below thanks everybody and shout out to the sleek crowd i'm happy to help you drift off and all of you that made this possible on both channels and i look forward to many more years decades if i can of content creation i'm happy as a clan and what i'm doing though i do wonder where that colloquialism came from do we really know the clans are happy and be sure to check out my books at your favorite online book or tailor and subscribe to my channels for regular in-depth explorations into the interesting weird and unknown aspects of this amazing universe in which we live [Music] so you

Channel: John Michael Godier

Views: 107,607

Rating: 4.9507523 out of 5

Keywords: universe, mystery, boyajian, star, kic, 8462852, drake, equation, fermi, paradox, tabby, oumuamua, unknown, unsolved, alien, extraterrestrial, uap, ufo, science, astronomy, astrophysics, mars, venus, galaxy, moon, jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, pluto, milky, way, kepler, spacecraft, technosignature, spooky, dyson, sphere, swarm, asteroid, mining, multiverse, simulation, theory, nanotechnology, mind, blown

Id: 1omAXK5qKZw

Length: 17min 33sec (1053 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 17 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/m3551xh]

Great post, my friend :)

[u/Smooth_Imagination]

This star, Tabby's Star, is in the northern constellation Cygnus

This is some fun speculation;

But we are heading as we rotate around the galaxy in that direction, and will enter into the space occupied by them.

I base this on the fact that, coincidentally (perhaps not?) this is the direction from which Ouamuamua came, thought to be roughly the position of what is now the star Vega in the constellation Lyra

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua

Now, according to that Israeli astronomer (name escapes me), he states that the Oumuamua object is not really travelling towards us, but acting as if it is more or less stationary, whilst we move towards it. Based on that then I conclude we are heading in the direction of all the north stars in the constellation Lyra and Cygnus is right next to it;

https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/441000988505949768/

Edit; It seems this is correct;

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/which-spiral-arm-of-the-milky-way-contains-our-sun/

https://astronomy.com/magazine/ask-astro/2020/07/in-which-direction-does-the-sun-move-through-the-milky-way

[u/Fried_Fart]

This video was great!

[u/DJGammaRabbit]

Can't watch, what was the finding?

[u/thahovster7]

Is this Tabby's star?

[u/Smooth_Imagination]

Does anyone know the light wavelengths being absorbed?

Its not necessarily the case that a solar collector would be detectible by infra red emission as it passes in front of the star, as this assumes a solar collector perpendicular to the light source, not of very high efficiency, and rejecting heat from that perpendicular collector.

However solar collectors working as concentrator systems cooled by radiators (using say a gas heat transfer medium) could be, and would logically be, cooled by arranging the radiator surface in-line to the light ray, so that both sides of the radiator are in fact angled facing the cool dark sky.

This arrangement might use mirrors to focus the light onto a collector at the star facing end of this radiator. The mirrored surfaces would not trap much light and as such could be cooler than expected.

There might be other collectors efficient at collecting some frequencies and not others, so that the light concentrated to a P.V. would be within its maximal efficiency range, and so reducing cooling requirement. But as such structures orbit, the area to the side of the star may emit IR in our direction. Depends on whether they are only looking at the light coming from the visible surface of the star.