Kepler's 'Alien Megastructure' Star, still baffles Science

[Captured Mind]

Last fall, astronomers were surprised when the Kepler mission reported some anomalous readings from KIC 8462852 (aka. Tabby’s Star). After noticing a strange and sudden drop in brightness, speculation began as to what could be causing it – with some going so far as to suggest that it was an alien megastructure. Naturally, the speculation didn’t last long, as further observations revealed no signs of intelligent life or artificial structures.

But the mystery of the strange dimming has not gone away. What’s more, in a paper posted this past Friday to arXiv, Benjamin T. Montet and Joshua D. Simon (astronomers from the Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech and the Carnegie Institute of Science, respectively) have shown how an analysis of the star’s long-term behavior has only deepened the mystery further.

To recap, dips in brightness are quite common when observing distant stars. In fact, this is one of the primary techniques employed by the Kepler mission and other telescopes to determine if planets are orbiting a star (known asTransit Method). However, the “light curve” of Tabby’s Star – named after the lead author of the study that first detailed the phenomena (Tabetha S. Boyajian) – was particularly pronounced and unusual.

http://www.universetoday.com/130213/tabbys-star-megastructure-mystery-continues-intrigue/

So, everyone remembers Tabby's star, the wierd star, which was thought to have a Dyson sphere around it. Then, it was eventually dismissed by comet cloud theory. Well, now after a long term obsrvation (results above), we will have to rule out comets. No one is saying it out loud, but it looks more like 'Alien Megastructures'.

Cant wait for the James Webb scope to check this out!

We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real," one of the researchers, Ben Montet from Caltetch, told Maddie Stone over at Gizmodo. "We just weren’t able to."

But basically what Kepler saw was KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, dimming at such an incredible rate that it can't solely be explained by any of the leading hypotheses we had: comet swarms, or the effects of a warped star.

For the first 1,000 days Kepler was observing the star, that diminishing wasn't too extreme - the star dropped in luminosity by about 0.34 percent per year. But over the next 200 days, the star dimmed more than 2 percent before levelling off. In total, the star lost around 3 percent of its total luminosity during the four-year period.

http://www.sciencealert.com/we-just-got-even-weirder-results-about-the-alien-megastructure-star