Is Tabby's Star a Binary System or an Alien Megastructure?

[fizzy]

KIC 8462852, aka ‘Tabby’s Star’ is in the news again, with more BS ideas about "alien megastructures'.

Isn't the simplest and most likely explanation for the intensity variability that it is a binary or multiple star system and that the Earth is in the same plane as the mutual orbit ?

 

[Bandersnatch]

Its variability is not like that of an eclipsing binary.

 

[arabianights]

how far is it from our solar system?

 

[mfb]

Isn't the simplest and most likely explanation for the intensity variability that it is a binary or multiple star system and that the Earth is in the same plane as the mutual orbit ?

Don't you think that explanation has been tested first?
The patterns do not fit to isolated transit events as we would expect it from multiple stars orbiting each other. They are too long, have the wrong distribution in time and they are too structured.

how far is it from our solar system?

~1300 light years.

 

[fizzy]

"and they are too structured."

Did you mean too unstructured? The alternative explanations I see like broken up planet remnants, comet clouds etc, and seem to be trying to explain fairly erratic unstructured events. Apparently the "alien megastructure' must be some kind of post-modernist abstract 3D artwork.

Maybe serious, professional scientists should stop coming out with such rubbish in an attempt to get their names in the media.

This is just unscientific click-bait.

 

[mfb]

The dips are not just "intensity goes down, intensity goes up again", they have internal structure.

Maybe serious, professional scientists should stop coming out with such rubbish in an attempt to get their names in the media.

The original publications are proper work. The way the media reports about the star is more questionable.

 

[fizzy]

It could also be super powerful, pan-dimensional beings whose 3D projections resembles white mice who are conducting an psychological experiment on how humans react to such inexplicable phenomena. But without any other evidence to support the idea just saying it is "consistent with ... " is unwarranted baseless speculation , not science.

 

[mfb]

Can we keep general discussion in the general thread, please?

This was a question specifically about binary stars.

Edit: I moved several posts to the main thread.

 

[stefan r]

Can we keep general discussion in the general thread, please?

This was a question specifically about binary stars.

Stars have unique spectral signatures. The variation from an eclipse will be greater in some wavelengths.
The graph of the data from kepler is lopsided. Stars that are not round are not physically possible.

an f22's shadow passing over a solar panel would look more like the graph than a soccerball's shadow.

 

[Simon Peach]

What about it being a binary with a brown dwarf as the other star?

 

[mfb]

What would that explain?
A brown dwarf is way too small to generate large dips.

 

[stefan r]

What about it being a binary with a brown dwarf as the other star?

A brown dwarf blocks light the same way that Jupiter would block light. Brown dwarfs are all nearly the same size. Round alien mega structures with Jupiter radius look a lot like that too. Jupiter radius mega structures are classified as planets and do not generate as much conversation.

A brown dwarf would have a lot of gravity. That causes the primary star to wobble. We can see doppler shifts in stars that wobble. A Saturn size planet could block most the light Jupiter blocks (71%) and weighs much less. If you include the rings Saturn blocks more light. A swarm of structures around a planet could create a transit lasting more than a day.

 

[Simon Peach]

Here is another off the wall thought; could it be in a binary system with a small black hole? It would be small but gravitational lensing could account for the large amount of dimming. more plausible than a mega structure

 

[newjerseyrunner]

Here is another off the wall thought; could it be in a binary system with a small black hole? It would be small but gravitational lensing could account for the large amount of dimming. more plausible than a mega structure

Microlensing actually tends to increase a stars perceived brightness, not dim it. It acts like a magnifying glass.

 

[stefan r]

Microlensing actually tends to increase a stars perceived brightness, not dim it. It acts like a magnifying glass.

A black hole with an alien mega structure around it could bend some of the light away from us and block photons the hole would have sent here. That does not simplify anything. It just makes it a binary with the same problems we had with a solitary.

Also a black hole would have a gravity effect on the star. Unless you allow the possibility that aliens built a micro-blackhole. That may not be physically possible. Regardless you might has well say "we detected a megastructure in 21st century" then add "there was a micro-blackhole in that megastructure". I believe a micro-blackhole would be a satellite orbiting a star and would not make the star a binary.

 

[Simon Peach]

starting to look like dust around it

 

[stefan r]

starting to look like dust around it

They only indicate that for the long term dimming trend. [article] I could only read the abstract but it says the data is form January to December 2016. That does not answer the core question at all. Comets could create dust. Aliens can pollute their environment with dust. Collisions create dust. Planets/moons have dusty rings and dusty surfaces. Some "weirdness that we had little understanding of" is now a "weirdness that we have little understanding of and is associated with dust in one case, probably". Could be an improvement.

My impression was that a classic "Dyson sphere" was ruled out because a Dyson sphere would radiate infra-red. A close look at KIC8462852 with spitzer in infrared and swift in UV/vis we see that visible light is dimming faster than infra-red. This is not "proof that it is aliens" but experts in the 60's expected aliens to have the same/similar effect. Spitzer measures between 3.6 and 4.5 micron. 4 micron wavelength would be the maximum wavelength from a 450°C object. Solar power towers on Earth operate around 550°C. At 450°C you could use sodium vapor (or your pick of a variety of other odd options).

 

[Simon Peach]

Oh well! it is dust!

 

[r8chard]

I do not understand the speculations about Dyson Spheres or other fabled castles-in-the-sky.

A DS would enclose the star like the skin of a golf-ball. Unless it broke up and we are seeing the remnants of revenants.

Simplest explanation? Tabby's Star is a cosmic vacuum cleaner. And it's clumps of dust bunnies, in a chaotic torus.

 

[Simon Peach]

well that's what I thought from the beginning

 

[mfb]

The speculations were a Dyson sphere in the process of being constructed.

Tabby's Star is a cosmic vacuum cleaner. And it's clumps of dust bunnies, in a chaotic torus.

Initial measurements didn't find an excess of infrared radiation that you would expect from that.

There is a reason astronomers didn't quickly figure out what it was.

 

[stefan r]

I do not understand the speculations about Dyson Spheres or other fabled castles-in-the-sky.

A DS would enclose the star like the skin of a golf-ball. Unless it broke up and we are seeing the remnants of revenants...

Cumulus clouds form in a nearly spherical oblate spheroid. The bases are between 6358 and 6385 km from the center of planet Earth most of the variation in radius is the pole to equator difference. Saying that cumulus clouds "enclose our planet like the skin of a golf ball" is a misleading statement. "Castles in the sky" might work for cumulus clouds especially cumulus congestus clouds. A "Dyson sphere" is usually much less spherical than the fluffy clouds found "enclosing" Earth. Advanced technology might make something like that possible but there is no reason to expect it. You should not blame Freeman for ideas that came from science fiction authors.

Freeman Dyson wrote a paper in 1960 that was published science. It has been misunderstood a few times.

RESPONSE: In reply to Maddox, Anderson and Sloane, I would only like to add the following points, which were omitted from my earlier communication.

1. A solid shell or ring surrounding a star is mechanically impossible. The form of "biosphere" which I envisaged consists of a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star. The size and shape of the individual objects would be chosen to suit the inhabitants. I did not indulge in speculations concerning the constructional details of the biosphere, since the expected emission of infrared radiation is independent of such details.

The term "dust" does not clear much up. Basically that means NASA is confident that it is not a gas or a plasma. We already knew that is was too big to be something that is gravitationally bound. "Dust" can be artificially created. The international space station and Viking probes are in the category "types of dust". Looking for artificially generated dust (pollution) is a legitimate form of SETI. Why would radio transmissions be more likely than particulate pollution?

The question is "How did dust block 20% of a stars light and then stop blocking it for more than a year"? "Where did the dust come from"? We are still lacking a natural explanation. Ruling out gas and plasma narrows it down a little bit.

Simplest explanation? Tabby's Star is a cosmic vacuum cleaner. And it's clumps of dust bunnies, in a chaotic torus.

A vacuum cleaner collects dust because atmospheric pressure creates a force that pushes the dust toward the vacuum. What sort of force pushed your dust bunnies? A vacuum cleaner is a type of structure. Are saying that there is a larger and stranger megastructure that created the megastructure?

The light curve for Tabbies star is not very chaotic. The Kepler data does not look like a torus. It might be possible to warp a torus and look at it from an odd angle.

What would make the dust stay in a torus? Why did the torus warp into the shape that blocked the light?

 

[mfb]

They have an estimate for the size of the dust particles, they cannot be larger than a few micrometers. It is much more than just "not gas or plasma".

The question is "How did dust block 20% of a stars light and then stop blocking it for more than a year"?

Dust clouds orbiting the star lead to such a pattern.