New Researchers -Found a Second 'Dyson Sphere' Star

When astronomers founded a strange pattern of light near a distant star called KIC 8462852 back in October, it was like nothing anybody had observed before. When a planet passes in face of star, the star’s brightness typically dips by around 1 percent, but KIC 8462852 has been experience dips of up to 22 percent, suggesting that amazing huge is zooming past. And now a second star with strange dips in brightness has been recognized.
Named EPIC 204278916, the star is estimated to be concerning the size of our Sun in diameter, but has only half its mass. It was founded by NASA's Kepler spacecraft in 2014, and ever since, a group of astronomers led by Simone Scaringi from the Max Planck organization for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany have been keeping tabs on its dips in light, or 'light curves'. And this thing is even foreigner than KIC 8462852.

The researchers details that over 78.8 days of observations, EPIC 204278916 display irregular dimming of up to 65 percent for around 25 consecutive days. As we mention above, something as top as a planet orbiting a star will cause it to dim presently 1 percent, so what could possibly be big enough to cause a dimming of 65 percent?
Back when researchers were trying to give details the irregular and large dips in brightness of KIC 8462852 - also recognized as Tabby’s star - they came up with two plausible explanations and one... not-so-plausible explanation. The first plausible explanation was that the huge and irregular light curves were being cause by a massive swarm of comets orbiting the star.
The second suggests that KIC 8462852 is a 'distorted star' that spins so quick, it becomes 'oblate', meaning it has a bigger radius at the equator than it does at the poles. As Paul Gilster from Centauri Dreams explain, "This produces higher temperatures and 'brightening' at the poles, while the equator is as a result darkened."
The not-so-plausible clarification is that the dimming is being caused by a kind of Dyson Sphere - a gigantic sphere made of solar panels that totally encircles a star, feature in several science fiction stories.
"Aliens should forever be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like amazing you would expect an alien civilisation to build," Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, told The Atlantic at the time of the finding.
Since then, neither plausible details has turned out to be all that convincing. Researchers have pretty much discarded the 'distorted star' hypothesis, and a learn back in January asserted that for a star to dim by about 20 percent over the course of an total century, it would need some 648,000 comets - each about 200 kilometres wide - to have transited it, which isn’t precisely plausible.
But what about a dust disk?
The German team behind the latest EPIC 204278916 comments suggests that its massive dips in the light curve could be cause by the existence of a protoplanetary disk that’s oriented 'edge-on' in relative to Earth. That direction could mean it's not only blocking the light from the star at sure times, we're also at the wrong angle to be viewing its possess infrared radiation. A protoplanetary disk is a rotating disk of dense gas and powder that tends to surround a newly formed star, which is reasonable in this case, seeing as EPIC 204278916 appear to be relatively young - no older than 11 million years. To put that in perspective, our Sun is predictable to be around 4.5 billion years old.
"A lot of disks are very thin, and we’re used to considering them at an angle. However, every once in a while, we’re bound to be aligned with a star that has its disk leaning edge-on to us, which means that any infrared radiation would be imperceptible, Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) are known to have the huge flux dips that this weird star has, and they’ve lately been shown to come in a variety of inclination angles." Ethan Siegel explain over at It Starts With a Bang.

The top part is the hypothesis could be applied to KIC 8462852 too, says Siegel. While KIC 8462852's age was at 1st  estimated to be hundreds of millions of years old, a figure of astronomers have argued that it could be much younger - just like EPIC 204278916.
And even if it's not, grown-up stars have been known to host rings of 'cometary-like debris', or dust, called circumstellar disks, which forever include a vast outer disk, but often an inner one as well. One of these circumstellar disks could be nearby KIC 8462852 in an eccentric orbit that's messing with our comments in a similar way to an edge-on protoplanetary disk.
"If this star turns out to be younger than is usually accepted (which many professional observer think it is), if it has a disk that happen to be edge-on (so we don’t see the infrared flux), and if there’s either a warped inner disk or cometary-like debris, then what we’ve founded is a new stage in the early evolution of a class of stars!" Siegel explains.
The German team's comments have yet to go through the formal peer-review process, so they're very much up for debate at this stage. They've presently gone up on pre-print site arXiv.org, so other researchers now have the chance to try and poke holes in their hypothesis. It's going to take a whole lot more study to figure out if this hypothesis can explain the weirdness of KIC 8462852.

But with Kepler expected to make newest observations of EPIC 204278916 next year, and researchers gearing up to point the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network at KIC 8462852 for a full year, we might not have to wait too extended for answers