We presently got even weirder results about the 'alien-mega structure' star
Previous year, the world freaked out over the finding of a star that was dimming and flickering so erratically, it couldn't be explain by any known natural phenomenon - prompting one scientist to really go there and suggest it could be evidence of a few kind of alien megastructure.
Follow-up studies have exposed no signs of alien behaviour, but NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has presently spent around 1,600 days observe the star, and things have gotten a lot weirder.
"We spent a extended time annoying to convince ourselves this wasn’t genuine," one of the researchers, Ben Montet from Caltetch, told Maddie Stone over at Gizmodo. "We presently weren’t able to."
Follow-up studies have exposed no signs of alien behaviour, but NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has presently spent around 1,600 days observe the star, and things have gotten a lot weirder.
"We spent a extended time annoying to convince ourselves this wasn’t genuine," one of the researchers, Ben Montet from Caltetch, told Maddie Stone over at Gizmodo. "We presently weren’t able to."
The results of these latest observations have presently gone up on pre-print site arXiv, so other members of the astronomy society can do their best to poke holes in them - which means we can't read too a great deal into them for now
But essentially what Kepler saw was KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star, dimming at such an incredible rate that it can't solely be explain by any of the most important hypotheses we had: comet swarms, or the effects of a warped star.
That doesn't mean we have any extra evidence for the alien megastructure hypothesis - the internet-backed idea that an superior civilisation is building amazing giant, like a hypothetical Dyson sphere, approximately the star to harvest its energy.
But what it does suggest is that something's going on roughly the star that we've never seen wherever in the cosmos before - the majority likely a combination of strange phenomena.
The Kepler data in the newest study was analysed by two Caltech scientists to get an understanding of how the star changed in brightness over the extra than 4- years the telescope was pointed in its direction.
What they saw was that, not only did the star's light production infrequently dip by 20 percent - the weird behaviour scientists first spotted previous year - but over the course of the observations, its entire stellar flux in fact dimmed.
For the 1st 1,000 days Kepler was observing the star, that moving back wasn't too extreme - the star drop in luminosity by about 0.34 percent per year.
But over the next 200 days, the star dimmed extra than 2 percent before levelling off. In total, the star lost around 3 percent of its totality luminosity during the four-year period.
The researchers analysed data on 193 near stars, and 355 stars that are similar to Tabby's star, and couldn't discover anything else like it.
So what does that mean? Well, we still don't actually know.
The majority likely answer is that there is a combination of factors involved, and we can't rule out any of the obtainable hypotheses, such as the effects of a indistinct star, a comet swarm, or the debris from an exploded planet.
But one of those on its own can't give details what Kepler has seen.
"The new paper states, and I agree, that we don’t have any in truth good models for this sort of behaviour," Jason Wright, the Penn State canvasser who originally started the whole alien megastructure thing, told Gizmodo. "That’s exciting!"
This isn't the 1st time that researchers have spotted Tabby's star dimming strangely, either. A paper previous this year showed that the star had unexplainably diminished by 19 percent over the past 100 years, but those consequences have since been widely discredited.
The new Kepler comments, on the other hand, suggest that the star is really dimming twice as fast, but these results also require to be independently verified previous to we can take them too seriously.
The superior news is that researchers are currently gearing up to point the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Tilly's star for a full year, with the expect of catching it in the act as it flickers - if that happens, other telescopes around the world can be heading for 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 extremely, very unlikely that this strange flickering star has something to do with aliens (and is even more exciting if it doesn't - because, hello new space phenomena!). But we recognize you're not going to listen anyway, so go ahead and obtain the memes ready.
After all, it's not every day you discover a star system that continue to defy science.
That doesn't mean we have any extra evidence for the alien megastructure hypothesis - the internet-backed idea that an superior civilisation is building amazing giant, like a hypothetical Dyson sphere, approximately the star to harvest its energy.
But what it does suggest is that something's going on roughly the star that we've never seen wherever in the cosmos before - the majority likely a combination of strange phenomena.
The Kepler data in the newest study was analysed by two Caltech scientists to get an understanding of how the star changed in brightness over the extra than 4- years the telescope was pointed in its direction.
What they saw was that, not only did the star's light production infrequently dip by 20 percent - the weird behaviour scientists first spotted previous year - but over the course of the observations, its entire stellar flux in fact dimmed.
For the 1st 1,000 days Kepler was observing the star, that moving back wasn't too extreme - the star drop in luminosity by about 0.34 percent per year.
But over the next 200 days, the star dimmed extra than 2 percent before levelling off. In total, the star lost around 3 percent of its totality luminosity during the four-year period.
The researchers analysed data on 193 near stars, and 355 stars that are similar to Tabby's star, and couldn't discover anything else like it.
So what does that mean? Well, we still don't actually know.
The majority likely answer is that there is a combination of factors involved, and we can't rule out any of the obtainable hypotheses, such as the effects of a indistinct star, a comet swarm, or the debris from an exploded planet.
But one of those on its own can't give details what Kepler has seen.
"The new paper states, and I agree, that we don’t have any in truth good models for this sort of behaviour," Jason Wright, the Penn State canvasser who originally started the whole alien megastructure thing, told Gizmodo. "That’s exciting!"
This isn't the 1st time that researchers have spotted Tabby's star dimming strangely, either. A paper previous this year showed that the star had unexplainably diminished by 19 percent over the past 100 years, but those consequences have since been widely discredited.
The new Kepler comments, on the other hand, suggest that the star is really dimming twice as fast, but these results also require to be independently verified previous to we can take them too seriously.
The superior news is that researchers are currently gearing up to point the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at Tilly's star for a full year, with the expect of catching it in the act as it flickers - if that happens, other telescopes around the world can be heading for 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 extremely, very unlikely that this strange flickering star has something to do with aliens (and is even more exciting if it doesn't - because, hello new space phenomena!). But we recognize you're not going to listen anyway, so go ahead and obtain the memes ready.
After all, it's not every day you discover a star system that continue to defy science.
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