Comets Can't Explain Weird 'Alien Megastructure' Star After All (newscientist.com) 412
schwit1 sends the latest news about KIC 8462852, the star that that led many to learn what a Dyson Sphere is. New Scientist reports: "The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, it might be aliens. Known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby's star, it has been baffling astronomers for the past few months after a team of researchers noticed its light seemed to be dipping in brightness in bizarre ways. Proposed explanations ranged from a cloud of comets to orbiting 'alien megastructures'. Now an analysis of historical observations reveals the star has been gradually dimming for over a century, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the cause. Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University saw the same century-long dimming in his manual readings, and calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each 200 kilometres wide, to have passed by the star — completely implausible, he says. 'The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot,' he says. 'But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas.' 'This presents some trouble for the comet hypothesis,' says Boyajian. 'We need more data through continuous monitoring to figure out what is going on.' What about those alien megastructures? Schafer is unconvinced. 'The alien-megastructure idea runs wrong with my new observations,' he says, as he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says."
Now... (Score:5, Funny)
I'm not saying it's aliens but it's aliens!
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I would check other stars close to this object for evidence of large defensive structures.
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If you exclude all other possible reasons it may be something there.
But what about a cloud obscuring the vision?
Re: Now... (Score:2)
It's been excluded too. Clearly it's far more likely that it's a alien megastructure.
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A "cloud" is not really excluded.
A cloud near the dimming star is excluded, because it'd mean more IR (just like a Dyson sphere would).
However, a cloud might be drifting in midway between earth and this star. The result of that could very well be 20% dimming over 100 years - and no extra IR. No IR because the in-between cloud is too far away from the star to be heated up.
As for the faster irregular variations, it might be 2 or more darker companions stars close to one bright star. The three-body problem is
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You should make contact with the astronomers that wrote the paper and tell them your great ideas. I'm sure they haven't thought of them.
Re:Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
I know you're joking, but sending nukes to attack a civilization with engineering advanced enough to build a Dyson Sphere or other mega-structures would probably be like ants developing the technology to throw grains of sand at relatively low velocities at us.
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Except a nuke would probably still be pretty destructive unless they had defensive systems in place. So more like if ants started throwing firecrackers. Not a serious threat under most circumstances, but annoying enough that you might decide to eliminate the problem by some means.
Re:Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
A nuke would not be very destructive at all, our sun is 1,300,000 times larger than the earth (so about 11911 times the surface area) a dyson sphere is larger than the star. When they say we have enough nukes to destroy the earth many times over they don't mean blow it into tiny pieces just destroy all life on earth.
Also a structure that size would have to withstand large astronomical objects hitting it from time to time.
if a large 16km asteroid it the earth it would be equivalent to a 200 Million megaton impact(http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q975.html) the biggest nuke ever made is only 50 megatons, that is 4 million times more. Even a 75 meter asteroid has a 100 Megaton impact. Basically if we could send a nuke that far into space the kinetic energy would probably be more than the explosion. And an object that size would be already dealing with things much bigger than a nuke on a regular basis.
also from here http://www.space.com/51-astero... [space.com] asteroids can reach up to 940 km across, not 16km.
Re:Now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Considering that even if we could launch nukes at light-speed (Which we can't - nothing remotely close) they wouldn't get there for a millenium and a half - it's already too late.
Whatever it is we're witnessing now, actually happened around 600AD - when we were busy trying to invent a better horse-collar.
Re:Now... (Score:5, Interesting)
Schaefer makes two VERY large assumptions in discounting the alien megastructure theory. The first being that the energy storage inefficiency would be large enough to create large amounts of infrared light, and the second being that the megastructures in question would have been initially constructed around the star, instead of being moved into place afterwards.
Re: Now... (Score:5, Insightful)
That and that if you're capable of doing this you can't do 20% of a star in 100y time. Look at the advances we've made in computer and building technology, even space tech in the last century and we as a species are just starting. Give us a thousand years at the current rate of progress and if we haven't killed ourselves we can probably strip mine a planet like Mars to build our energy structures.
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but you would need to mine 100 planets like mars in the time, kind of.
Re: Now... (Score:5, Informative)
but you would need to mine 100 planets like mars in the time, kind of.
Nope. Just one is enough. To build a Dyson sphere at one AU (the distance of the earth from the sun), or about 150,000,000 km, the sphere would have an area of 4 * pi * r^2 = 9e23 m^2. The mass of Mars is 6.39 × 10^23 kg. So if you build the sphere with a mass of about 1 kg / meter squared, you could do it with just a little over one Mars sized planet.
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Re: Now... (Score:5, Informative)
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The solar wind is going out at all directions. You would have to first build a Dyson Sphere of solar wind harvesters in order to implement that idea.
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If you had direct energy to matter conversion you'd have the easier matter to energy conversion down pat and converting Mars to energy would be a more efficient use than using it to build a Dyson sphere.
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Fair enough, but building the Dyson sphere may generate more pork for your home state.
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If you had matter to energy conversion down pat, I doubt the locals on Mars would approve of you converting their home into a Dyson sphere.
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Err... an energy source.
That corrected, I wonder how hard it would be for a civilization that advanced to manipulate existing structures into a Dyson sphere.... I.E., collecting "nearby" debris such as asteroids, moons, or even planets, and assembling them like LEGOs to build an infrastructure of some kind around a star in some sort of grid or lattice.
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Ah, I see you're grasping at some way to refute my argument with word play. "We", of course, is the human species. A thousand years is not enough for evolution to make much of a dent, "we" means if we could travel in time we'd fit right in. Now a million years ago there was no human race, and in another million there won't be one either. Evolution is still happening.
Is it, though? Haven't we largely thwarted evolution, and replaced it with survival of everyone we like? We do our utmost to remove any evolutionary pressure, and save people who would have died if it weren't for our own direct intervention. We spend resources on fertility treatments. We do as much as we can to level the playing field and avoid evolutionary competition.
A thousand years of devolution is more than enough to make a rather large difference.
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> A thousand years is not enough for evolution to make much of a dent
Cultures evolve much, much faster than human bodies do - and even they are several orders of magnitude slower than the rate of evolution of a neural network - like the ones we get born with between our ears.
Also - you massively underestimate just how different our world really is compared to the one from a thousand years ago.
For starters, a thousand years ago you would probably be dead - seeing as child mortality rates were so much high
Re:Now... (Score:5, Interesting)
There's another possibility that's just as far out, and would explain the missing IR.
It's a traffic hub for small FTL ships.
If they use something like an alcubierre metric based warp drive, then the gravitational fields around the craft will scatter the star's light into vectors that are no longer straight lines away from the star. This will result in the star's effective brightness being reduced.
Get enough of them going in and out of the system routinely, and you will get the observed phenomenon.
To me, the obvious thing to do is look for gravitational waves coming from the system. If you can't catch their broadcasts (because they use something other than open channel radio), then look for the propwash.
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Oh my, I have been insulted by an anonymous coward. Whatever shall I do? /s
go invent conspiracy theories about "space nutters" somewhere else, dumbass. The argument that there are no aliens out there loses steam daily as missions like Kepler give statistical samplings of planetary system compositions. The suggestion of it being from FTL use is less convoluted than the suggestion that it is a Dyson swarm, because FTL is going to be an essential technology to construct a dyson swarm. I threw it out there, not
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Yep, cue the Greek guy with the electric hair, he'd have no problems explaining this.
Alien Megastructures: (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alien Megastructures: (Score:5, Funny)
"Tonight on the History Channel."
But where does Hitler come into it?
Re:Alien Megastructures: (Score:5, Funny)
It's a secret weapon of the Luftwaffe... tonight at 8pm.
Re:Alien Megastructures: (Score:5, Funny)
Accually, the Luftwaffe did build an airbase on the Moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
However, the whole project got derailed, when the astronauts discovered the nudist colony on the Moon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
They had the choice of fighting for the master race, or playing naked volleyball with chicks who had 60's style Russ Meyer breasts.
They "did the right thing . . . "
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In low gravity no less!
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In low-gravity no less!
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All the Nazis went to that star and started all over again.
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"Tonight on the History Channel."
But where does Hitler come into it?
Did Hitler attend a secret meeting with alien representatives in an underground meeting room under Washington DC in 1929?
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It's been a long time since there were any history shows on the History Channel. Alien Megastructures: the reality show where rival alien groups compete to transport large structures around the galaxy in short time frames. If they break it they buy it...
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May is springtime for History Channel Hitler.
and Germany?
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Is the AC referencing a song from a fictional musical in a movie about a fraudulent musical, the musical made from that movie, or the movie version of the musical made from the movie about musical fraud?
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They're still hunting the dude on the European History Channel. I don't really understand why they keep going to Argentina and do the exact same thing there three times a week.
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Wasn't the History Channel good (or at least, sort of OK) a few years back?
By a few I probably mean about ten.
It's Primes (Score:3, Insightful)
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Maybe they're not building it... (Score:2)
even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. --Summary
So maybe the aliens aren't building it. Maybe they're just moving it... towards us...
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"just a century"? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries? (We've just been seeing a dimming signal over that period, not complete extinction of the star's light.)
I mean, yeah, I have some idea of the energies involved, and I'm not sure I can envision a process that would run at that pace producing anything other than streams of plasma at gamma-ray temperatures. But then again, I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace. Good thing I didn't accept that particular process-design gig, I guess.
Re: "just a century"? (Score:5, Insightful)
The surprise would be if a Class-whatever civilization that's building a Dyson Sphere hadn't already mastered self-assembling, self-replicating construction processes. There should be an exponential increase in the rate over time, if we haven't already missed that window. As the buildbots consume the planets, you just get more buildbots until the number is sufficient. Or if the sphere is to be made of the bots themselves then there's no need for a tail-off. Clarke called 'em monoliths when he had them eat Jupiter, but same idea.
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Buildbots probably wouldn't consume planets; escaping from their gravity well would be much too costly compared to the alternatives. They probably would use asteroids instead, taking their time to tweak their orbits so they arrive at their destination processing plant with a minimum amount of energy. This would almost certainly not happen at an exponential rate. As with all mining, they would start with the low hanging fruit, causing production to become increasingly more difficult as time passes, prohibiti
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Thats all very well, but these buildbots still have to obey the laws of physics and self replication of complex objects simply can't happen that fast. It requires time and a boatload of energy and complex chemicals and material resources. You can't make something complex out of hydrogen unless each little bot has a mini fusion reactor on board which is pretty unlikely. Evolution has had 4 billion years to fine tune self replication on this planet with huge resources and sunlight, and yet even the fastest gr
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"There have been a bunch of mass extinctions that have killed off billions, if not more, branches of life."
And none of them killed off bacteria.
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We might not know all the laws of physics, but if the was one that allowed life to group exponentially faster than currently then there's a good chance evolution would have "discovered" it by now. Assuming of course it could be used with the kinds of conditions and resources found on earth I grant you.
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If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries?
Nah, they probably built replicators to accomplish the task. But then those replicators destroyed their civilization and are gradually surrounding the star with a Dyson sphere... made completely out of replicators.
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What are the odds that not only can they build it in a span of a few centuries, but also that human civilization would exist and be able to observe the specific few centuries they build it over?
Re:"just a century"? (Score:4, Interesting)
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Who knows how many pre-megastructure civilisations there are in the galaxy? There could be millions, each one thinking they are alone.
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Who knows how many pre-megastructure civilisations there are in the galaxy? There could be millions, each one thinking they are alone.
Increase that imaginary number by a few orders of magnitude, and there might be an explanation for dark matter there...
But the question then becomes "why don't we see this happening every way we look?"
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and just do it at one star?
doing it in span of 100 years makes no sense from energy use perspective.
Lipton Sphere (Score:2)
If you're willing to believe in a civilization capable of building a Dyson sphere, how much more of a stretch is it to believe they could do it in a few centuries?
You're all wrong - the star is clearly orbited by a huge swarm of teapots [wikipedia.org]. After all, we can't hope to understand the thinking of a race capable of building such a "Lipton Sphere" so you can't prove its not teapots.
I'm not sure I can envision a process that would digest entire planets worth of material and cast it into a shell at any pace.
PS: I thought the original Dyson Sphere concept was a huge cloud of satellites that eventually grew to capture most of the star's energy.
PPS: The satellites could still be teapot-shaped.
PPPS: The tea-cosies are blocking the infra-red. Nothing worse than cold tea.
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I guess it could have been build over thousands of years, but most of the time when we haven't been recording it and when we did photograph the star 100 years ago covering parts of the star we couldn't see, and now the structure is rotating into our line of sight (possibly again) covering it a bit, until it rotates out of sight again. Or it could be a gas cloud that we are now seeing through at the worst angle. In both case it should slowly go away again as they rotate and or out viewing angle subtle change
Inconceivable! (Score:5, Insightful)
... he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century.
Clarke's first law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
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... he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century.
Clarke's first law: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
Clarke's third law would also be appropriate: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
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What about the "hot pole" theory? (Score:4, Insightful)
This star is larger than our Sun, yet it rotates thirty times faster. Its poles are significantly flatter, hotter, and brighter than the rest of the star. Thus a large object could block 22% of the star's light while covering a much smaller percentage of its disk. This also explains why the dips in the light curve are pointed on the bottom, not flat.
There could also be a large unseen planet (i.e. one that does not transit the star from our point of view) pulling on the star's tidal bulge and causing its visible pole to slowly precess away from us. That would explain the gradual dimming.
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... hot pole ... bottom ... bulge ...
That is all.
Re:What about the "hot pole" theory? (Score:5, Interesting)
There are a couple of problems with your ideas.
Basically the most any planet in any star system could cover is approximately 2% of a star during a transit (as a comparison a transiting Jupiter seen from another star system would cover about 1% of the Sun). This is despite our estimate of when a planetary body would become massive enough to become a brown dwarf is about 80 times the mass of Jupiter because the mostly hydrogen gas in any gas giant is highly compressible. A planet with twice the mass as Jupiter would have a diameter only slightly larger than that of Jupiter, very much less than the 1.26 (= 2^[1/3]) growth that would be expected by simple linear growth.
If a body instead were large enough to become a brown dwarf, then the interplay of the light being generated by fusion at its core becomes more important and its size would balloon out to many times that of Jupiter. And, of course, a brown dwarf would be easily detectable spectroscopically.
Thus ANY planet in orbit around Tabby's Star that was transiting in front of it simply could not cause the brightness of the star to dip by as much as 22% as was once seen. There is the FAINT possibility that somehow what was observed was a planet within our own Kuiper Belt that happened to transit Tabby's Star during Kepler's observations, and that being MUCH closer to Earth than Tabby's Star's distance of about 1500 light years would allow it to cover more of that star, but there is the problem that a Kuiper Belt gas-/ice-giant should have been glaring obvious to our Spitzer Space Telescope which specializes in the infra-red range.
Your idea of the dimmer poles precessing towards us contains contradictory ideas: the planet causing this somehow has to be massive AND close enough to cause this, and yet has to have an orbit that is at least a couple of hundred Earth-years in length. This "newly" detected dimming was determined from photographic plates taken at different times from 1890 to around 1990.
My suspicion is that what we may be watching is a relatively short-lived (meaning less than tens of thousands of years) phase of Tabby's Star evolving from a main sequence star at the very earliest stage of becoming a (super-)giant. There is just barely enough helium accumulated at its core that its fusion only fitfully begins only to sputter out when the additional heat generated by that hotter fusion diffuses that core to below helium-fusion levels. Of course this "current" sputtering was generated tens to hundreds of thousands of years ago at the core (taking that long for the scattered light to reach the star's photosphere and thus become visible to us), but when helium fusion actually takes hold then the star ballooning out to become a (super-)giant will overtake that sputtering.
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People who post genuinely insightful comments as ACs do the rest of us a great disservice by not logging in, since we have to wade through the shitcakes to find the quality comments. You can have a slashdot login and remain anonymous, since Slashdot does not have a real name requirement.
If you have something meaningful to say, please log in. To do otherwise is to provide cover to trolls.
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As an AC you're at least somewhat immune against personal attacks and trolling.
Personal attacks and trolling are SOP for existence. Slashdot has helped me learn to not get discouraged by the pricks.
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But it seems to have helped you learn that who says something has some value attached to it over what they have to say.
Well, no. What it's helped me learn is that ACs are usually dumbshits. That there are a few great comments hidden among the dross does not change this. Most comments worth leaving are worth signing.
It's really a shame that ACs are taken less serious than other posters by you.
It's really a shame that Slashdot lets people post without logging in, because it produces far more shit than it does quality comments. Slashdot would be better off without the AC option.
I use to maintain a fairly low UID account here until I lost my mod points for not beating the open source drum.
I stopped getting mod points, so I set myself unwilling to moderate and stopped thinking about it. Moderation is broken here by
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Multiple small stars close around a black hole? (Score:2)
Planetary breakup? (Score:2, Insightful)
Roche limit reached about a century and a half ago, breakup continues. A super sized rocky planet which has migrated to within Mercury like distance of it's star and has subsequently been pulled apart. Put the planet in an orbit which is nearly edge on (which it would have to be to be detectable using these methods) and as the debris cloud increases in size the star is progressively dimmed (from our point of view) more and more.
Seems the most obvious explanation.
Interestingly, if you did want make a dyson
This is old news (Score:5, Funny)
If the dinner won't come to us... (Score:2)
Why can't it be... (Score:2)
a planet that's broken up, creating an asteroid belt?
perhaps we should consider the obvious. (Score:5, Funny)
maybe the star isn't screwed in tightly enough. just give it a half twist and see if that stops the flickering. ;)
Alien stories (Score:2)
I wish everyone would quit with the alien stories already.
It's obviously ghosts.
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Kylo Ren (Score:2)
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Oh and thanks for reminding me of how shit that movie was. What the fuck was the Starkiller, a planet converted to a space station, or a space station built to look like a planet? I though it was a planet, but then it wouldn't have any propulsion which makes it pretty stupid. Oh man I better stop before I start a rant... Fucking stupid movie....
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flush (Score:2)
"...he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century. What's more, such an object should radiate light absorbed from the star as heat, but the infrared signal from Tabby's star appears normal, he says."
Our grandparents couldn't imagine the technology that our children use today without thought.
How much hubris does it take to believe that we know what kind of technology 'advanced' aliens - or even the grandchildren of our grandchildren
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"A Logic Named Joe" by Murray Leinster (1946).
Mr. Leinster, at least, seems to have imagined some of the technology that our children use today. And he was a decade older than MY grandparents (and I'll be a grandfather soon).
But your point is still reasonable, if a longer timeline is used. Why should we expect that Charlemagne should have anticipated the modern world? And we should we think that we can anticipate the limits of the possible for our descendants in 1200 years (for those of you who are una
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What if it's not local to the star? (Score:2)
What if what we're seeing is not inherent dimming of the star from its own internal processes or by its own orbital objects and cloud, but by objects closer to home? In particular, is it possible that a particularly dense portion of the Oort cloud has slipped between the star and us? We're only starting to get a handle on Kuiper belt objects. We really have no idea what's in the Oort cloud or how it's distributed.
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Not sure about exact proportions, but Earth is rotating around the Sun. I have a feeling that anything in Oort cloud, big enough to dim that star regardless of position of Earth around a Sun, would also dim certain others stars nearby (in angle terms).
Maybe the star is just depressed (Score:2)
"I just don't feel like shining any more. I'm watching the sentients on my local planet, and they're just mean to each other. It's so sad to watch. I give up. I'm tired of burning hydrogen for these ungrateful whelps. All this fusion for them is giving me iron streaks! Not worth it. I'm going to go spend a few petaseconds focused on some other projects that are less work intensive for me."
Dim-witted assumptions (Score:2)
"...he thinks even advanced aliens wouldn't be able to build something capable of covering a fifth of a star in just a century..."
So, alien megastructures are a possible theory here, but for some reason we want to sit back and believe that construction is the main reason the theory is bunk?
No wonder people on this planet still believe aliens built the pyramids. Seems rather stupid and ignorant to even theorize about limits of alien capability.
Speaking of construction, 100 years ago humans were still marveling at the internal combustion engine...not that we "dumb" humans have really done anything with that technology in the last centu
seems conceited (Score:2)
Seems rather conceited for us to say "there's no way they could cover 1/5 of a star in a century" when little more than a century ago one could have found plenty of 'experts' who would poo-poo the idea of powered flight.
Hell, only 30 years ago, nearly every single civilian phone in the world was somehow attached to a wall.
And as far as his comments about black-body radiation from such a structure, it doesn't seem terribly unreasonable for a civilization capable of such engineering such a megastructure in th
Re:From the wisdom of Sherlock Holmes... (Score:5, Funny)
"Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible."
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
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What aliens would let their food supply or spare parts herd ie Earth get to see anything other than deep empty space to keep them calm and tender?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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You and Doyle make the same mistake. Assuming that one can enumerate a list of all explanations and then go about crossing off the wrong ones one by one, and further, that even assuming we can enumerate all of the explanations, possible and impossible, the subset of possible explanations numbers exactly one.
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Enumerating the explanations...how would that work? There isn't a recursive procedure to enumerate all and only the explanations. So we are left with picking a language, say English, and enumerating all the sentences in English. That's a bit tricky. We'd have to generate all strings in the alphabet in English (including spaces and punctuation) and then test each one for whether it is a valid or meaningful English sentence. I'll chose valid because meaningful is ill-defined. So we'd have to consider that "Th
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> So right here, on planet Earth, the same types of people - scientists - are incapable of understanding how a large structure the size of the pyramids was built a couple thousand years ago..
There are lots of theories; there's no particular surprise that they were able to, but we don't know exactly how it was done because it was a long time ago and the Egyptian engineers didn't leave very good records. Nobody is going to be able to prove within a shadow of a doubt how it was done, but there are lots of p
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I am expecting to read news here first, not after everyone has already published them.
You've been on this site for, I'd guess, around 14 or 15 years. What, in that time, lead you to believe that you'd ever see news published here in any sort of timely manner, let alone so quickly that you'd be likely to find it here first?
Slashdot has always had a reputation for bringing you yesterday's news tomorrow. If you're really still believe you should be able "to read news here first", the only way this site will meet your misplaced expectations is if you get your news here exclusively, never seeki
Re:"Old" news (Score:4)
I beg your pardon, but this is already old news. It has been relayed by other channels at least two days ago. If /. still want to pretend being news for nerds, they have to catch up and post news when they are news, not two days later.
This comment is old news. Seeing as slashdot isn't a news site it's always been like that, it has no writers or reporters. All it is, is some people that put up interesting articles from elsewhere and then we all bitch and moan about all kinds of things, sometimes the original article may get a mention or may not depending how it goes.
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