[SPACE] Alien Mega structure?

PhiSlammaJamma · Oct 18, 2015

Which does beg the question, why haven't we built a ginormous nose yet so we can cross this off the list of extinction events for Earth.

KingCheetah · Oct 19, 2015

The war for The Sphere begins.

rhino17 · Oct 19, 2015

Probably the Borg

fallenphoenix · Oct 19, 2015

"No-one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No-one could have dreamed that we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets. And yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this earth with envious eyes; and slowly, and surely, they drew their plans against us."

Buck Turgidson · Oct 19, 2015

RunninRaven · Oct 20, 2015

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/7a_sx3ozoXI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Yung-T · Oct 22, 2015

SETI Institute undertakes search for alien signal from Kepler Star KIC 8462852
October 22, 2015 by Bob King, Universe Today

http://phys.org/news/2015-10-seti-alien-kepler-star-kic.html

Cool that they took a break from their usual schedule and immediately turn to this planet, kinda tells you what a buzz there is around this.

percicles · Jan 15, 2016

EVACUATE KATY NOW!!!!!

The Case of the So-Called Alien Megastructure Just Got Weirder

It’s probably not aliens. Seriously guys, it’s very, very unlikely that it’s aliens. But the weird, flickering star known as KIC 8462852 still isn’t sitting right with astronomers. In fact, it just got a lot weirder.

Ever since KIC 84628532 was spotted in the Kepler Space Telescope’s dataset, astronomers have puzzled over what the heck could be responsible for the star’s logic-defying light curve. Over four years of observational data, KIC 8462852 flickered erratically, its light output sometimes dropping by as much as 20%. That’s highly unusual stellar behavior, and it can’t be explained by a transiting planet.

Some astronomers proposed that KIC 8462852 might be occluded by a swarm of comets. Others suggested aliens.

Specifically, astronomer Jason Wright tossed out the idea that the star’s weird distortion might be the result of a giant alien construction project—you know, like a Dyson sphere. The idea electrified the citizens of Earth and mobilized a worldwide SETI search for hard evidence of our celestial neighbors. Sadly, two independent searches, for radio signals and laser beams—both of which could indicate a technological society—didn’t pan out. (And remember, we’ve confused inexplicable observations for aliens many, many times before.)

But according to a study just released arXiv, the comet hypothesis is now falling flat, too, and the mystery of KIC 8462852 has deepened considerably. While Kepler only has a few years of data on the star, astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University decided to look at photographic plates of the sky dating back to the late 19th century. To his amazement, he learned that over the last hundred years, KIC 8462852's light output has steadily faded by about 19%, something that’s “completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star.”

“This presents some trouble for the comet hypothesis,” Tabetha Boyajian, a lead researcher on the team that originally discovered the star, told New Scientist. “We need more data through continuous monitoring to figure out what is going on.”

Indeed, it’s hard to imagine either aliens or natural celestial bodies dampening a star’s light output that much over such a short period of time.

It’ll be a while yet before we’ve solved the mystery of KIC 8462852. But this is what’s great about scientific discovery. Literally all possible explanations are on the table at this point—and the truth about this tantalizing star could be more fascinating than we ever imagined.

http://gizmodo.com/the-case-of-the-so-called-alien-megastructure-just-got-1753269810
Click to expand...

MoonDogg · Jan 15, 2016

PhiSlammaJamma · Jan 16, 2016

What is taking so long, this is like Oak Island, where it's taken two years to find a friggin coin in a well. We need answers nerds. Bring it.

calurker · Jan 16, 2016

percicles said: ↑

EVACUATE KATY NOW!!!!!
Click to expand...

Dimming star? Maybe it's being sucked into a super canon of some sort. Just a thought.

bongman · Jan 16, 2016

If we were to claim tha this is where God resides, build a good background story, do you think we can create a new religion out of this?

CCorn · Jan 16, 2016

bongman said: ↑

If we were to claim tha this is where God resides, build a good background story, do you think we can create a new religion out of this?
Click to expand...

I'm in.

RedRedemption · Jan 16, 2016

calurker said: ↑

Dimming star? Maybe it's being sucked into a super canon of some sort. Just a thought.
Click to expand...

Star Wars Spoiler:

Starkiller base charging up to destroy Earth.

Mr. Brightside · Jan 16, 2016

bongman said: ↑

If we were to claim tha this is where God resides, build a good background story, do you think we can create a new religion out of this?
Click to expand...

Good idea. Just bought the domain name.

Joshfast · Jan 16, 2016

bongman said: ↑

If we were to claim tha this is where God resides, build a good background story, do you think we can create a new religion out of this?
Click to expand...

Dear Leader - when will Gods wrath turn on our own sun?

B-Bob · Jan 16, 2016

bongman said: ↑

If we were to claim tha this is where God resides, build a good background story, do you think we can create a new religion out of this?
Click to expand...

And as the far star dimmed, so too did its star-child named Bongman start to shine ever brighter with wisdom delivered unto the ignorant masses of Earth.

And forever January 16 was celebrated in the festival of Brightening, when the Earth began dividing into the blessed Bright and the doomed Dim.

tinman · Jan 17, 2016

Amiga · Aug 6, 2016

It's Aliens

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1608.01316v1.pdf

Last year, the world freaked out over the discovery of a star that was dimming and flickering so erratically, it couldn't be explained by any known natural phenomenon - prompting one scientist to actually go there and suggest it could be evidence of some kind of alien megastructure.

Follow-up studies have revealed no signs of alien behaviour, but NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has just spent around 1,600 days observing the star, and things have gotten a lot weirder.

"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."

The results of these latest observations have just gone up on pre-print site arXiv, so other members of the astronomy community can do their best to poke holes in them - which means we can't read too much into them for now.

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.

That doesn't mean we have any more evidence for the alien megastructure hypothesis - the internet-backed idea that an advanced civilisation is building something giant, like a hypothetical Dyson sphere, around the star to harvest its energy.

But what it does suggest is that something's going on around the star that we've never seen anywhere in the cosmos before - most likely a combination of strange phenomena.

The Kepler data in the latest study was analysed by two Caltech scientists to get an understanding of how the star changed in brightness over the more than four years the telescope was pointed in its direction.

What they saw was that, not only did the star's light output occasionally dip by 20 percent - the weird behaviour scientists first spotted last year - but over the course of the observations, its entire stellar flux actually dimmed.

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.

The researchers analysed data on 193 nearby stars, and 355 stars that are similar to Tabby's star, and couldn't find anything else like it.

So what does that mean? Well, we still don't really know.

The most likely answer is that there are a combination of factors involved, and we can't rule out any of the existing hypotheses, such as the effects of a distorted star, a comet swarm, or the debris from an exploded planet.

But one of those on its own can't explain what Kepler has seen.

"The new paper states, and I agree, that we don’t have any really good models for this sort of behaviour," Jason Wright, the Penn State researcher who originally started the whole alien megastructure thing, told Gizmodo. "That’s exciting!"

This isn't the first time that researchers have spotted Tabby's star dimming strangely, either. A paper earlier this year showed that the star had unexplainably diminished by 19 percent over the past 100 years, but those results have since been widely discredited.

The new Kepler observations, on the other hand, suggest that the star is actually dimming twice as fast, but these results also need to be independently verified before we can take them too seriously.

The good news is that researchers are now gearing up to point the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Tabby's star for a full year, with the hope of catching it in the act as it flickers - if that happens, other telescopes around the world can be directed at the star, to get an idea of what's going on once and for all.

In the meantime, we would remind you that it's very, very unlikely that this strange flickering star has anything to do with aliens (and is even more exciting if it doesn't - because, hello new space phenomena!). But we know you're not going to listen anyway, so go ahead and get the memes ready.

After all, it's not every day you find a star system that continues to defy science.
Click to expand...

BamBam · Aug 6, 2016

<iframe width="1244" height="700" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_y5GsCmLjfk" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

I'm with the Donald on this:

"Twinkle Twinkle little star,
How I wonder what you are!"
.......
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