Oolite Bulletins

The Kepler data for the star are pretty bizarre: There are dips in the light, but they aren’t periodic. They can be very deep; one dropped the amount of starlight by 15 percent, and another by a whopping 22 percent!

Straight away, we know we’re not dealing with a planet here. Even a Jupiter-sized planet only blocks roughly 1 percent of this kind of star’s light, and that’s about as big as a planet gets. It can’t be due to a star, either; we’d see it if it were. And the lack of a regular, repeating signal belies both of these as well. Whatever is blocking the star is big, though, up to half the width of the star itself!
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My first thought was some sort of planetary collision, like the impact that created the Moon out of the Earth billions of years ago; that would create a lot of debris and dust clouds. These chunks and clouds orbiting the star would then cause a series of transits that could reproduce what’s seen.

The problem with that is that there’s no excess of infrared light from the star. Dust created in such impacts warms up and glows in the IR. We know how much IR stars like KIC 8462852 give off, and we see just the right amount from it, no more. The lack of that glow means no (or very little) dust.

The last idea the astronomers looked at was a series of comets orbiting the star. These could be surrounded by clouds of gas and other material that could produce the dips seen. The lack of IR is puzzling in that case, but not too damning. If another star happened to pass nearby, then its gravity could disturb the first star’s Oort cloud, the region billions of kilometers out where we think most (if not all) stars have billions of icy objects. This disturbance could send these ice chunks flying down toward the star, where they could break up, creating all those weird dips—ices in them would heat up, blow off as a gas, and could explain the odd shapes of the dips detected, too.

And, as it happens, there is another star pretty close to KIC 8462852; a small red dwarf about 130 billion kilometers out. That’s close enough to affect the Oort cloud.

This doesn’t close the case, though. Comets are a good guess, but it’s hard to imagine a scenario where they could completely block 22 percent of the light from a star; that’s a huge amount. Really huge.

Alex wrote:

I spell with an accent.

Wildeblood wrote:

Who's to say it's not a fragmented foreground object obscuring the view? It might not be objects in that stars system at all that is occluding it.

With the aid of ground-based observations, the team ruled out variability from the star itself or interference from other nearby stars. Instead they decided the star was being covered by clumps of dust. But where did the dust come from?

Collisions within an asteroid belt around the star, or a smash-up between two larger bodies like the one thought to have produced the Earth and moon in our solar system, wouldn’t produce all of the dips in starlight.

Having worked through the other possibilities, the team concluded the most likely explanation is a family of exocomets that veered close to the star and were broken up by its gravity, producing huge amounts of dust and gas in the process. If the comets are on an eccentric orbit passing in front of the star every 700 days or so, further breaking up and spreading out as they go, that could explain all the dips in the data.

Cosmic-scale fireworks
KIC 8462852 is about 50 per cent larger than our sun, so if this comet explanation is correct, the dust cloud would be pretty big. It would be an impressive sight up close, says Boyajian. Something that size in our solar system would blot out a significant amount of sunlight. When Earth passes through the debris clouds left in interplanetary space by passing comets, we get meteor showers. There’s no evidence of a planet in the KIC 8462852 system, but someone standing on such a world as it passed through the dust cloud would see quite a light show, says Boyajian. “The scale of the meteor shower would be huge, like cosmic-scale fireworks.”

More data will help pin down the true nature of this strange signal. Kepler stopped working properly in 2013, so the team haven’t been able to track the star as well as they would like. There were no observations of the star in April 2015, when the next dipping events might have occurred, but the team are planning to keep an eye out in May 2017. “It’s really frustrating that the light curve got really, really exciting right before the Kepler mission died,” Boyajian says.

Still, the team says Planet Hunters was instrumental in finding this signal in the first place. There could be more oddities hiding in the data we already have.

“Planet Hunters have gone through maybe about half of the Kepler light curves, so there is still a whole lot to be viewed and classified,” Boyajian says.

spud42 wrote:

couldnt find the facething article but have a gander at this ( for the record i am A-) lol

http://humansarefree.com/2014/07/does-r ... alien.html

Astronomers Found Giant Alien ‘Megastructures’ Orbiting Star Near the Milky Way

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would “expect an alien civilization to build”, astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Wildeblood wrote:

T'other day:

spud42 wrote:

couldnt find the facething article but have a gander at this ( for the record i am A-) lol

http://humansarefree.com/2014/07/does-r ... alien.html

As are most people of Anglo-Saxon descent. That website is an absolute load of crap. Thanks for that link.

Today:
That website is so cool. Just today they have an article about this story. This is how their version begins:

Astronomers Found Giant Alien ‘Megastructures’ Orbiting Star Near the Milky Way

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would “expect an alien civilization to build”, astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

There's none of those pesky graphs of light curves, instead there's artists' impressions of Dyson spheres under construction. Proper science journalism:-

http://humansarefree.com/2015/10/astron ... alien.html

O.K. about Rheusus factor:

98% of ALL HUMANS are Rhesus (+)
02% of ALL HUMANS are Rhesus (-)

you were correct that the last remaing tribes with high concentrations of Rheusu (-) factor are Europeans! However..its only a small minority of all Europeans that are Rh(-) (although many more who are Rhesus(+) are carriers of at least 1 Rhesus(-) gene.

The last remaining tribes of highly concentrated Rhesus (-) blood are:

THE Basques= (40-50%) -These people are the original Europeans..they gave rise to the "celts"

The "Black Irish"=(20-35%) (RH-) the so called "black Irish" are in fact the origianl Irish....they are just less "mixed" that the other Irish folks....they are dark haired, and black bearded because they are genetically the same as the Basques...who once lived throughout the celtic world!

THE Irish=(10-20%) (RH-) still very simular to the Basques genetically...but more Mixed than the Black Irish...so lower Rh(-) numbers

the Scotts= (13-23%) (RH-) again another "celtic" tribe...genes identical to the Basques...with some Anglo saxon and Norse blood mixed in...so Lower Rh(-)...and somewhat lighter colored hair,beards, eyes!

spud42 wrote:

O.K. about Rheusus factor:

98% of ALL HUMANS are Rhesus (+)
02% of ALL HUMANS are Rhesus (-)

you were correct that the last remaing tribes with high concentrations of Rheusu (-) factor are Europeans! However..its only a small minority of all Europeans that are Rh(-) (although many more who are Rhesus(+) are carriers of at least 1 Rhesus(-) gene.

The last remaining tribes of highly concentrated Rhesus (-) blood are:

THE Basques= (40-50%) -These people are the original Europeans..they gave rise to the "celts"

The "Black Irish"=(20-35%) (RH-) the so called "black Irish" are in fact the origianl Irish....they are just less "mixed" that the other Irish folks....they are dark haired, and black bearded because they are genetically the same as the Basques...who once lived throughout the celtic world!

THE Irish=(10-20%) (RH-) still very simular to the Basques genetically...but more Mixed than the Black Irish...so lower Rh(-) numbers

the Scotts= (13-23%) (RH-) again another "celtic" tribe...genes identical to the Basques...with some Anglo saxon and Norse blood mixed in...so Lower Rh(-)...and somewhat lighter colored hair,beards, eyes!

this debunks your Anglo Saxon theory..........

my ancestry is Irish/English..... born in the Midlands in a town called Loughborough.... south of robin hood country..lol