Tabby's Star - A Mystery Finally Solved? | Answers With Joe

in the summer of 2014 the ice bucket challenge took over the world video after video after video swarm the Internet of celebrities and politicians and just average folks dumping buckets of water over their head to raise money for ALS research 17 million people participated in this campaign and the average bucket size is about 5 gallons that means that all told about 85 million gallons of ice water were dumped on people's heads in 2014 that's about the same amount of cold water I'm about to throw on the whole tabby star alien mega-structure thing sorry Salvador Marley Tommy Dee Mayan k and blue pixel works and many others asked for a video on tabby star there are some subjects that cover on this channel that don't really need any background explanation because if you watch this channel then there's no way you don't already know about it and tabby star is one of those subjects I'm gonna give you some background anyway cuz that's my job and I go to work the story a tabby star begins with the Kepler space telescope Kepler's primary mission involves staring at a small patch of sky between the constellation Cygnus and Lyra for four straight years that was its job just stare at that spot the reason was because that spot had about a hundred thousand stars that were the right age in size to have exoplanets and that was Kepler's mission was to find exoplanets through the transit method I'll talk about this a bit in my exoplanets video the transit method involves looking at the luminosity of a star and finding dips in the luminosity of the star that occur when a planet passes between us and the star which is called a transit a jupiter-sized planet would only cause a dimming of about one percent so the Kepler instruments were extremely sensitive to these kinds of fluctuations and it stared at the star for a really long time in order to catch the planet on multiple orbits which gives more information about its speed and how far away from the star it is Kepler's stared at this patch of sky from 2009 to 2013 but it was an event in 2011 that grabbed all the headlines one particular star called kic 8 4 6 - 8 5 - was showing random non periodic variations in its luminosity that were indicative of things like comets and asteroids and small bodies but on March 5th it suddenly plunged down 15% remember a jupiter-sized planet would only reduce it by 1% so whatever this was it was huge way too big to be a planet but aside from that the punch was very most of the planet transits are clean periodic dips that last for a few hours but this was all over the place not to mention the dips lasted anywhere from five to eighty days this happened again 720 days later in February of 2013 and this time I caught the eye of Tabitha Boyajian an astronomer at Louisiana State University she dug into the data and released a paper that September called where's the flux or WTF which ruled out several hypotheses the first was that it's not a planet this was pretty obvious one theory was that it was a dust cloud from a protoplanetary disc but this was ruled out because the star was too old to still be having a protoplanetary disc it should have all formulated into planets at that point a shower of comets was theorized but the sheer number of them that would be required to dip the luminosity in this way was in the tens of thousands so that was ruled unlikely after finding all the natural explanations to be weak this opened up the brainstorming to some of the more unnatural explanations meaning the SETI Institute focuses mostly on radio signals because it's believed that an advanced civilization would use radio to communicate in the same way that we do but one of the other things that they keep an eye out for is difference in luminosity and stars because it's been theorized by scientists as well as science fiction writers that a super advanced alien civilization might build big mega structures around their stars in order to capture all their energy some of those ideas include Dyson spheres and the Troitsky brains which I've talked about previously on this channel these are structures that could blot out the light from stars and unusual ways it's theoretical but leave no star in turn so she was interested in this star and when to research it further so tabby we should really be calling dr. Boyajian she's a PhD not I can't turn to study to see if they would be interested in it of course when word got out that said he was looking into a star that may possibly have an alien mega-structure around it the internet went crazy and then kic 8 4 6 to 8 v 2 became known as tabby star by the way the KIC part of that name stands for Kepler input catalog this is the catalog for all the stars that were studied by Kepler so the team it said he pointed their Allen telescope array at the star to see if they can find any radio signals that would look promising one of the first things that they noticed was that whatever this thing was it was in the planets habitable zone that gets interesting so the transit was expected to occur again in 2015 but it was actually missed this time because two of the reaction wheels and Kepler had broken down which ended its primary mission but the interest in this star was at a fever pitch so dr. Boyer Jane got creative and she did a Kickstarter campaign which wound up raising over a hundred thousand dollars to continue researching it she talked about that in a TED talk you can see right here through this campaign they were able to secure a telescope time at the Las Cumbres Observatory Global telescope Network which is a privately owned global network of telescopes it would allow them to watch this star 24/7 in 2017 when the transit was expected to occur again this in combination with planet hunters org which is a citizen scientist group that helps professional astrophysicists comb through the mountain of data that comes off of this thing a whole new wave of research occurred in 2017 this time in real-time research that seems to kind of put the mystery of tabi star to bed from March to December of 2017 they found four dimming episodes which they collectively named else which stands for Elsi like Las Cumbres Observatory nerds are clever and this time they were able to observe the wavelengths coming off the star what they found was that the dimming episodes didn't effect all wavelengths equally they found that most of the dimming came from the blue end of the spectrum which means that whatever is this blocking this light isn't solid because if it was it would block all the wavelengths the same and the most likely answer for that is a gigantic cloud of fine dust when light shines through fine particulates it shifts red because blue wavelengths are much shorter and a lot more likely to get blocked by dust that red wavelengths could go right around this is why our sunsets turn red because there's more atmosphere for the light to travel through more atmosphere means more dust for all the blue light to slam into now if you're paying attention you might remember that dust was something that was ruled out early on because it was believed that the star was too old for a protoplanetary disc to still be around this is still true so where could this massive dust cloud have come from well the most likely explanation is some kind of planetary collision much like the one that created our Moon except much much worse now you can argue that it could still be aliens because we don't know what kind of materials they build with and maybe the materials they use would block different wavelengths and blah blah blah and that's true it is possible but this is more possible because another thing about tabi star is its age it's only as old as our son was when multicellular life first formed on planet Earth it's just incredibly unlikely that life would form and evolve that much faster there than it did here which is kind of a good thing because if there was life on that planet it had a really bad day now in the interest of being thorough there are more pieces of this mystery to consider if you've ran into tabby star you might have heard about a study that compared the photographic plates that contain tabby star from 1890 to 1989 and found that it had dimmed by 20% in that time which would be unprecedented for an f-type star but there are other studies that have said when you account for the different technologies that were used over the past 100 years it's really not that big of a difference maybe in the 1 to 3 percent range now there are still some other ideas to consider one is called a Bach globule which is a very small dense compact and isolated ball of dust and gas this can be passing between us and the star and could explain some of the long-term dimming but not so much the big dips and the regularity of those dips another idea is that between us and the star is a black hole that has a ring of dust and debris orbiting around it so the dust isn't orbiting tabi star it's orbiting something between us and tabby star that we can't see but this is total speculation nothing like that's ever been seen before so a destroyed planet is still the most likely culprit although if you really want to keep aliens in it I guess you could say it was destroyed as a show of force by an alien mega weapon an attempt to find out where the rebel base is hidden seen that somewhere before the research on the star continues because even if it's not aliens it's still a window into some secrets that the universe has to offer but when you think about it the research itself might be the most groundbreaking thing about this star this was research that came from a groundswell of citizen scientists working right alongside astrophysicists in what's basically crowdfunding science there's so many of us who really love science but for whatever reason are not working in that field but that doesn't mean there's not still stuff we have to offer projects like Zooniverse org are making it possible for eps like you and me to be a part of this journey of knowledge if you want to learn more about how you can be a part of the next big discovery you can go to Zooniverse org or if you're more interested in projects like tabi star you can go to planet hunters org neither of them are sponsoring this video I'm making nothing off of this I just I think it's really cool I know you probably came here looking for aliens sorry this is a bummer but it's important to rule out all of these other options because then when we do find an alien smoking gun we'll know it's for real if you do still want to believe I've got the perfect shirt for you right here and if you like that shirt and the shirt I'm wearing there's these and dozens more available at answers with Jo comm slash shirts link down the description and as always this video is brought to you by Tinker boy comm tanker boy is a vitamin solution that helps prevent regular occurring canker sores and mouth ulcers I grew up with these things and I finally a few years ago found the solution that got rid of them for the first time in my life so now I'm making it available to you and everybody who deals with this it is actually not a virus it is an immune system glitch that causes an excess of inflammation and this keeps it from happening to suffer you can go to Kenko boy calm check it out for yourself and a huge big special thank you to the patreon supporters who help support this channel I do this full-time now so I can't thank you enough for keeping my lights on around here I want to shout out some of the new people that have joined watch me murder some names there's William Austin Smith hottie Ikki jet Smith to Smith's Jonathan Bay's Colin Kershner William McCullough's Lisa Coker Bryan Purcell ray Roth Naugle Brian Porter Alex hence Ellicott Martin Ruby John Boyle Leslie Davis Eddie Anderson live party in Tobias Johansen Wow thank you guys so much if you would like to join them and get access to my secret blog as well as outtakes and behind-the-scenes stuff you can go to patreon.com/scishow joe alright thanks again for watching if you enjoyed this please like share comment and if this your first time here check out some of my other videos and if you like those please do subscribe because I've come back with science videos just like this every Monday all right you guys go out and have an eye-opening week and I will see you next Monday love you got a sticker

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 588,128

Keywords: answers with joe, tabby's star, tabetha boyajian, KIC 8462852, exoplanets, alien megastructure, dyson sphere, matrioshka brain, planetary collision, kepler space telescope, SETI, search for extraterrestrial intelligence, aliens, transit method, planetary transit

Id: w-53zWPLRzE

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2018