Mysteriously Variable Star Causes Speculation About Dyson Sphere (slate.com) 339
gurps_npc writes: Phil Plait just wrote an interesting article about a star that is extremely variable. We generally look for cyclical, minute (1%) variations in star light to detect planets. But we found one that has a variation in starlight of over 20%. We don't have a very good explanation for this, and some people are speculating that such variation could be caused by a civilization building a Dyson Sphere around the star. From the article: "Such a sphere would be dark in visible light, but emit a lot of infrared. People have looked for them, but we've never seen one (obviously). Which brings us back to KIC 8462852 (PDF). What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star's light." Plait says it's overwhelmingly unlikely, but interesting nonetheless.
Journalists doing all of the speculating (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Journalists doing all of the speculating (Score:5, Informative)
It's important to note that the actual scientists studying the star aren't the ones screaming "ALIENS!" - that's the journalists who misreport and distort things to make them "sell better".
Actually these are the actual scientists studying the star, they aren't screaming aliens but they do seem to be saying something like "we can't figure out how to model this with any natural phenomena so lets see if non-natural hypothesis fit".
FTA:
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
[...]
Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
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The notion that complex life in the universe occurs only on earth is not actually that far fetched.... to be certain, it is the only planet that we definitely know that such life exists, and the existence of such life elsewhere, however appealing or likely it may seem, given the size of the universe, is not actually proven or even necessarily particularly likely, since we don't actually know what the real odds are that such life would develop in the first place.
We need a sample size of more than one plan
"Overwhelmingly Unlikely" (Score:5, Insightful)
...but still fun to wildly speculate about.
The question on everybody's mind... (Score:2, Funny)
I don't care about this. I just need to know if it will still vacuum efficiently.
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They never lose suction.
I was wondering if it would be unbearably hot inside on of these hypothetical spheres. How would the heat dissipate?
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How would the heat dissipate?
You turn it into other things like kinetic energy, electricity, etc. Of course it all wants to go back to heat eventually, which is why in theory Dyson spheres still emit infrared. Which you allow to bleed off into space. But not before making all that energy work for you first. Kind of like a dam. You do realize that a dam doesn't completely block a river, right? Unless of course you want the river to flow over and around your dam...
Oh dear god..... (Score:4, Insightful)
How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?
Nahh, let's go with a civilization that has harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:4, Interesting)
What he said.
From TFA, we're talking something that occults 20% of the visible area of the star in question. That something would have to ~40% of the diameter of the star in question to do that. So, for a Sol-sized star, we're talking 300,000km in diameter.
No, we're not going to be finding any natural objects that size that aren't emitting light themselves.
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Nahh, let's go with a civilization that has harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....
If you have a normal amount of planetary material there is no need to harvest materials from other solar systems in order to build a dyson sphere. That would be a far more monumental task.
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You are bad in math, are you? Or only bad in estimations?
If we gather all material of our solar system I doubt we would be able to make a reasonable sized Dyson Sphere which is a single atom thick.
With reasonable sized I mean: slightly larger than earth orbit. Obviously we want a larger one, and the surface squales with the square of the radius. Theat means if we want to include Mars into the sphere (60% farer away) we need ~40% more material.
A reasonable distance would likely be beyond Saturn ...
Keep in mi
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Hmmm ... moving huge quantities of material from your own solar system is an absolutely enormous scale.
How much energy and engineering is going to be required to move the stuff from another entire solar system? I believe when GP says "That would be a far more monumental task", it's both an understatement and an indication of just how crazy it would be.
Honestly, since the math for building a Dyson sphere is well and truly beyond me ... if you can go to another solar system and bring back the stuff you need
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:5, Informative)
You are bad in math, are you? Or only bad in estimations?
The calculations have already been done, here is a quote from wikipedia "estimates that there is 1.82×1026 kg of easily usable building material in the Solar System, enough for a 1-AU shell with a mass of 600 kg/m2—about 8–20 cm thick on average, depending on the density of the material." Of course there are some debates as to whether that is sufficiently thick. Regardless of thickness there are a variety of design problems with the solid shell version and that's not what Dyson was actually proposing. A Dyson swarm or Niven ring would be much more practical.
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I didn't know atoms were so big. As a back-of-envelope thing, I worked out the area of a sphere around one A.U. in radius. It's around 108686793600000000 square miles (I live in the U.S., so sue me). The volume of the earth, assuming a radius of 4000 miles, is around 268083199987 cubic miles. Now, if we divide that by the area, w
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:4, Interesting)
The mass of a Dyson Sphere of carbon with a radius equal to the orbit of Ceres that is 1 millimeter thick turns out to be...
drumroll...
slightly less than the mass of Earth.
And that's using the density of solid carbon. You could probably get a sphere out past Saturn's radius switching to a fancy aerogel or something.
And with "all material of our solar system" at "one atom thick"...
With that we'd get a Dyson sphere with radius a third the way to Alpha Centauri.
Ummm... about that remark of estimatory prowess...
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:4, Interesting)
How about a more sane and more plausible... larger brown dwarf twin?
The signal is highly aperiodic (read the article), so a brown dwarf won't be a good explanation. I'd expect a protoplanetary disk would be a more reasonable explanation than a brown dwarf, but then there's the problem with the missing IR. It could be a trinary system with lots of occlusions from our perspective (which would mean that the stars would all be very close together). This star is just ... odd, no matter what the explanation ends up being.
What we need is a set of extra-terrestrial telescopes flying in precise formation so that we can do 100,000 km baseline interferometry and get the sort of resolution to see detail like that.
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harvested all the planets from other solar systems near them for resources to start building a dyson sphere....
Has anyone done the math on this? Just how much rock would we need to mine to make the metal to build a Dyson sphere
Based on my analysis of Press Release Promise Units mixed into an alloy with Wild Speculation Hype, about a kilogram of carbon nanotubes.
The formula is:
- Carbon nanotubes
- something something
- Dyson Sphere
- profit
Re:Oh dear god..... (Score:5, Interesting)
Go to the Wikipedia page on the subject. The math has been done and even rough estimates say that our solar system contains only about 1/100th of the material necessary to construct a full Dyson Sphere (ignoring the many other problems with such a construct - drift of the sphere wrt the star, no known material strong enough to withstand the compressive forces, etc).
Basically, constructing a full sphere would require harvesting about 100 solar systems, hauling all that material back to a single star, creating materials unlike anything we know of and marshaling a construction force beyond imagining... The heat signature of the harvesting, hauling and construction would dwarf any star (and hence be easily detectable).
But sure, lets have "fun" and speculate about things that simply could not be just so as to pollute the waters with pseudo science until no one can discern the difference between real science and malarkey.
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But sure, lets have "fun" and speculate about things that simply could not be just so as to pollute the waters with pseudo science until no one can discern the difference between real science and malarkey.
If, 1000 years ago, you had described an Internet-based smartphone or a manned moon mission or quantum teleportation to someone, it would have sounded just as batshit crazy to them as the scenario you describe sounds to us. Part of the fun of trying to imagine a civilization a million years more advanced than humans is that our minds can barely even grasp the concepts, much less how they'd be carried out.
Think of how much technological progress humans have made in the past 100 years. Where will we be 1,000,
or silly boring mainstream view might be correct (Score:2)
This star believed to have large amounts of dust remains of broken up comets orbiting it with high eccentricity (very elliptical as opposed to more circular). Yawn.
The alternative is so much more exciting, provocative, brain invigorating: "Now I'm not saying it was mega-engineering by aliens, BUT IT WAS MEGA..."
Except... (Score:4, Funny)
While we are speculating "overwhelmingly unlikely" (Score:4, Interesting)
While we "watch" them build their sphere, they would have already completed it, detected us using their advanced long range sensors, and used their FTL armada of battleships to come destroy us. Since we are still here, that is a NOT a Dyson sphere.
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At this point, only star systems within 100LY of Sol are the ones we would
why build a Dyson sphere? (Score:2)
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Planets are inefficient at providing living space.
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Look at our own civilization. We consume ever-increasing amounts of power, and are always looking for bigger sources. Fossil, nuclear, solar, wind Decades ago, physicist Freeman Dyson popularized an interesting idea: What if we built thousands of gigantic solar panels, kilometers across, and put them in orbit around the Sun? They’d capture sunlight, convert it to energy, and that could be beamed to Earth for our use. Need more power? Build more panels! An advanced civilization could eventually build millions, billions of them.
Will be boring once we find out. (Score:4, Funny)
We always imagine great things at the slightest anomaly, only to find the boring truth later.
Maybe it is just Jesus playing with a dimmer switch. Kids like to play with dad's things you know.
Re:Will be boring once we find out. (Score:4, Interesting)
Whatever the explanation is, something that is big enough to block over 20% of a star's light isn't going to be boring.
Fanciful notions (Score:2)
[yada, yada, yada, ...] That’s the whole basis of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (see the movie Contact, or better yet read the book, for more on this).
Read a book? With words and stuff? Talk about science fiction. :-)
just proof of... (Score:2)
This is just proof of how anything that has the word "Dyson" makes the news.
http://www.abbysguide.com/vacu... [abbysguide.com]
Where is Occam when we need it? (Score:2)
More probable scenario (Score:2)
A living entity (Score:5, Funny)
If you've ever watched Star Trek, you know that every strange phenomenon is an indication that the nebula, or asteroid belt, or whatever...is actually a living, sentient being. Maybe THAT'S what's going on here!
Interstellar debris? (Score:4, Interesting)
How is it that Plait says no excess infrared means it isn't dust clouds and unlikely comets, but then he turns around and suggests Dyson sphere? One of the defining characteristics of Dyson spheres is excess infrared.
Here is a hypothesis that fits the data gathered so far: interstellar debris. It can be oddly shaped. It can block the star's light without generating excess infrared. A cloud of it passing between Earth and KIC 8462852 would produce non-periodic luminosity variations. If the debris was a light year away from Earth, the largest chunk would have a diameter of around 500 km. There would be no constraints due to orbital velocity, and no aliens.
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Re:Swarm, not sphere. (Score:5, Funny)
That would only apply if it was finished being built. The rabid distortions and exaggerations are claiming it's "under construction", which means it would be all patchy and full of mostly open areas still.
But if their Congressional funding got cut mid-sphere... Dyson's Bowl.
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Re: Swarm, not sphere. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're anywhere inside a symmetrical spherical shell, there's no gravitational pull from the shell. It all balances out [wikipedia.org]. So, unless the sphere was spinning fast, you'd just fall into the sun - and you could only tune the spinning for one narrow band, you'd still get too much or too little everywhere else.
This problem is what inspired Larry Niven to publish his idea for a "ring world" - a more practical, lower tech approach. First as a non-fiction article in a SF mag, then as a series of SF novels. Now most people only know the idea Halo, sadly.
Plus a sphere isn't gravitationally stable - you'd have to constantly work to keep the star centered. Without some sort of gravity control, the whole idea is impractical, which is why finding one would be a big deal to physicists - we have no reason to think any such thing is possible today (but then, we don't have a good quantum gravity theory either).
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Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it
Lots of other possibilities (Score:3)
Keep in mind the closer to us the occultation is occurring, the smaller the occluding object needs to be. Could just be a small chunk of matter in interstellar space moving along a coincidental path nearer to us than the star in question. You know how big an object would have to be to completely occult our sun from the edge of our solar system? You could carry a whole collection of them in one pocket.
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A pocket sized collection of things going very quickly around the solar system to account for the periodic occlusions?
I'm not saying it was aliens, but ....
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A pocket sized collection of things going very quickly around the solar system to account for the periodic occlusions?
But what if it was an object orbiting another dark object, in a plane perpendicular to our line of sight (around axis parallel to our line of sight)? It would periodically occlude that much more distant and much bigger bright object.
Re:Lots of other possibilities (Score:4, Interesting)
All it would need to be is an irregular object with a spin. Think about it. If I put you in one spot, and an irregular, spinning object more-or-less between you and what you want to look at, what happens to your view of the object?
Re:Lots of other possibilities (Score:4, Informative)
Except if this were the case we would see diffraction spectra from the edge of the occluding object. We would also be able to find the object and measure it directly: in the attached paper they do a detailed follow up where no such occluding objects are discovered.
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It's an armada, heading directly towards us.
Re:Lots of other possibilities (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Lots of other possibilities (Score:4, Funny)
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Any scientist would apply Occam's Razor and look for a simpler natural explanation and not an Alien Species building a Dyson Sphere.
Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.
Re:Swarm, not sphere. (Score:5, Informative)
You know, right there in the abstract (don't even have to dig) is "... we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event." They already have a hypothesis.
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Besides, Ringworlds are much more efficient.
But ringworlds are unstable!
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Only if they get hit by giant meteors.
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Original statement: "Ringworlds are unstable."
Response: "Only if they get hit by giant meteors."
No, that's incorrect. Larry mentions in one of is forewords that some nerdgeekcosmologists did a bunch of math to show that a ring spinning around a star is unstable in the sense that it'll drift such that the star is no longer at the center. Fortunately (back-filling :-) ) it turned out the Ringworld Engineers put in a bunch of stabilization mechanisms.
The big meteor led to other problems.
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Actually, Dyson's original concept is a massive swarm of solar satellites or statites with no need for any superstructure. The idea of a single physical sphere came later, to say nothing of the ridiculous idea of living on the surface of the inner surface of the thing.
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Of course given the distance of this star, if they were building a Dyson sphere, it might be finished by now (we'd only being seeing construction progress from ~1,500 years ago) and a civilization advanced enough to do that could probably travel the vast expanses of space, which they might well
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I'm far from an expert, but the wild speculation that's coming from outsiders (i.e. not scientists who published the paper) is that it could be a civalization in the process of building a Dyson sphere. I suppose if they only had a piece complete maybe we'd see something like this? Anyway, my money would be on something much more boring, like some dark-type binary star scenario, although, I suppose they could tell if that was the case. IDK, it's interesting. Any other ideas from the astronomers on what it could be?
I'm no astronomer/astrophysicist, but I wonder if the 20% dim could be caused by a bunch of brown dwarfs floating in tight formation, or a recent collision among planets/planetoids that created a large cloud of debris, the one is still floating around the original center of mass, and which still has not have had enough time to disperse evenly around an orbit)?
Or maybe it's God... Jibbers Crabst!!!!
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As AC mentioned, there's no particular reason you have to orbit in the same plane as your planet - you could build a solid ring around our sun just just off the ecliptic, providing untold billions of times more power than currently reaches Earth, and only have to deal with a couple brief solar eclipses a year as we pass behind it. You could even put a small gap in the ring and tune its orbital speed so that the gap is always passing through the ecliptic during the window when there would otherwise be an ecl
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If built large enough, the sphere could be outside your planet's orbit.
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Nah, terribly inefficient with materials, A Dyson sphere with a radius equivalent to Earth's average orbital distance would cover roughly 109 thousand, million, million square miles, at an average power density of only ~1.5kW/m^2. Build it instead at only a million miles distant (only ~twice the diameter of the sun) and you need cover 100,000 times less area to capture the same power, though admittedly the 13MW/m^2 might provide some engineering challenges.
Then just leave a minimally-occluded ring in the p
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A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.
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We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet
If 99% of the sunlight reaching the planet was suddenly blocked, I think you'd quickly redefine what you mean by "need."
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It is however a threshold situation. The tools and technology to build a solar panel to sustain us like that would make it cheaper to build the next one. Once we can do it once, economic growth would dictate that we pretty obviously should build another to get the most out of the investment. Repeat to the logical conclusion...
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A civilization probably wouldn't need the output of an entire star right away. We barely need 1% of the sunlight that reaches our planet, a small panel could feed our energy needs for the next few decades.
Or maybe quite a bit less than 1% (you know, global warming and all that stuff)...
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It could also simply be *not a dyson sphere*. A matroshka brain would actually be somewhat more consistent - clouds of thinly spread dust, punctuated by a few planets or planet remnants in the process of being disassembled.
Seeing as how the star is never completely occulted, but the predicted object sizes for some scenarios have to be substantially larger then the star, then it would be somewhat more consistent.
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Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
The idea is that you live inside of the sphere, and can convert all of the sun's rays into useful energy.
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Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
Think about it. Or Google it.
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Most things need some sunlight to survive. So why would you block out all of the sun's light?
Of course this question has been answered before... ;^p
"We don't know who struck first, us or them, but we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time, they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun."
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The only problem is there's no actual excess of IR emission from the star - which is one of the reasons they've ruled out a lot of conventional dust-cloud and asteroid belt explanations.
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1500 years ago on Earth, the "real" King Arthur reigned; Clovis beat the Visigoths at Vouille; Constantinople saw the Hagia Sophia wrapped up; and Justinian ruled the Byzantine empire.
Why do you assume that a species capable of building a Dyson swarm around that time, would have died o
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Dark matter doesn't interact visibily with light or matter. Comets or "random space debris" will not cause consistent 20% dimming.
And yet it's still equally likely, since as the original article, and several posters have pointed out, the whole "it was aliens! Dyson sphere!" thing would be causing large emissions in the IR area, which are not present.
Also, the term "dark matter" is not just applied to exotic invisible space matter, but also to clouds of gas and dust that are just too cold to emit any light (hence, dark). Random space debris in large enough concentrations, oort cloud distortions from another star (the small red dwa
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"dark matter" is never used in astronomical terms these days to refer to cold objects. They're called "cold" for that reason.
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Given the level of technology (and investment) needed to build a Dyson sphere, I would guess that it would be designed to last for quite some time. So the descendants of the builders are probably still alive and using it.
It probably has been repainted a few times. Some Bondo in the meteorite dents, etc.
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Doesn't matter the farther out we look the farther we see into the past.
The one of the farthest known galaxies is EGSY8p7 what we see of it today happened 13.2 billion years ago. When you look up at the sky you are looking into the past.
KIC 8462852 however is only 1,500 light years away.
You might be able to complete a dyson sphere in that time frame. But I don't know the timescale you would have to be working on for such a project to be feasible.
We are local creatures with local knowledge (Score:3, Insightful)
We know almost nothing about nature anywhere outside the solar system. We have been making assumptions as best we can with the data we have, but the fact is all of our real experience is local and we just don't know what might be going on that far away.
Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying that guessing about some alien civilization we can't prove exists, building a fabulously and probably impossibly expensive structure around a star we can't see that well might be jumping to conclusions?
Dyson Denier.
Re:We are local creatures with local knowledge (Score:5, Insightful)
The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system. That's beside any issue regarding building this structure which wouldn't collapse on itself.
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The amount of material required to build such a thing exceeds what's available in a solar system.
As I note elsewhere, a cloud of solar power satellites or mirrors, say, 1-2 million km out from the Sun's center would suffice both for capturing the Sun's complete output and using far less mass. Mercury would have enough mass to cover this.
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No, it really can't. If there's a shadow of a tree on a building from a street lamp, I can look between the lamp and the building and locate the tree in a perfectly empirical, down-to-earth (ha!) manner, as well as knowing very well that the light is coming from the lamp.
If there's a little spinning object with an irregular topology out there between us and this star, we can't tell. We can't tell if it's a star at all -- all we can do is look at the sp
Re:Coalescing gas clouds? (Score:5, Funny)
It could also be God, slowly orbiting around the star while chatting with Jesus.
I mean, while we're here positing off-the-wall concepts like Dyson Spheres on the basis of nothing more than "a star regularly dims 20% in a cycle"...
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According to the article, it isn't in a cycle.
Re:Coalescing gas clouds? (Score:5, Informative)
That's one of the most confusing parts though; the dips in light are not regular. From the article:
"It turns out there are lots of these dips in the star’s light. Hundreds. And they don’t seem to be periodic at all. They have odd shapes to them, too. A planet blocking a star’s light will have a generally symmetric dip; the light fades a little, remains steady at that level, then goes back up later. The dip at 800 days in the KIC 8462852 data doesn’t do that; it drops slowly, then rises more rapidly. Another one at 1,500 days has a series of blips up and down inside the main dips. There’s also an apparent change in brightness that seems to go up and down roughly every 20 days for weeks, then disappears completely. It’s likely just random transits, but still. It’s bizarre."
Obviously then... (Score:3)
It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!
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It is a huge space armada passing somewhere between ourselves and the star. And they brake for nobody!
Well that would explain why the light from the star is plaid.
Re:Coalescing gas clouds? (Score:5, Informative)
You mean, like something broken up passing in front of the star? Which is the leading hypothesis presented in the paper?
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According to Phil, that theory doesn't work well as something more would show up under IR, and in this case, the IR is as expected. Phil was suggesting the possibility of comets from the star's Oort cloud being disturbed by a red dwarf of the designation KIC 8462852.
The Bad Astronomy article is well worth the read. I haven't read the paper though.
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Is it possible that they're fragments of a collision and haven't become periodic yet - too busy colliding and accreting and all that kind of shit?
Re:Coalescing gas clouds? (Score:4, Funny)
It could be anything; a faulty stench coil...some cheese on the lens.... Who knows?
Natural Explanations (Score:5, Informative)
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Ancient Aliens? (Score:2)
When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
Re:Ancient Aliens? (Score:5, Insightful)
we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
Leave that to the scientists. This is the internet!
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When there is no scientific evidence to back up one's wacky and complex idea, we should consider simpler and more plausible explanations (occam's razor)
That's not actually what Occam's Razor says. What Occam's Razor says is that we should consider all explanations that haven't been proven false by evidence. When two explanations give the exact same predictions, and therefore can't be differentiated through observation of evidence, then you assume the simpler one. Not because it has a higher probability of being right, because given nothing to differentiate between the two theories, you can't make that claim. Simply because even if the more complex expl
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It's pretty obvious what this has to be. The Protectors are building a ringworld (aka Niven Ring) and have installed the shadow-squares (or rectangles) first. We're seeing the periodic dimming as they pass in front of the star. When they finish the ring, the star will look constantly slightly dimmer (unless precession) from our angle and the variation will go a way.
Wrong. It's a Kempler Rosette. The Pierson Puppeteers got there first.
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Frankly, if we had evidence that there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere out there, I'd be terrified.
I'm not optimistic that all civilizations at that level of tech will somehow magically be all peaceful and loving. Life is struggle, and anything that "wins" at evolution has to be a tremendous competitor.
If there is a civilization with the tech to build a Dyson Sphere and there is only one of them, then it's a pretty good sign that travel between the stars is impractical if not impossible.