Tabby’s Star

 

I used to be in the know with this kinda stuff, but sadly not of late. Ever since my physics days, mid-90s, I subscribed to Astronomy and, later, Sky & Telescope. I knew the constellations, the stars within them, how to locate the planets and such phenomena as Cygnus X-1, the likeliest candidate for a black hole. A pal and I would regularly motor up north to the woods in the frigid cold of winter or in the middle of a buggy summer night, drink a few beers and point my telescope all over the night sky. But not for a long time. The magazines became politicized about a decade ago and I did not renew my subscriptions. Other things bullied for my attention, and despite a desire to keep up with astronomical doings, I haven’t.

Then I heard about Tabby’s Star.

I won’t tell you the source of my initial information about Tabby’s Star, as it’s somewhat less reputable than Astronomy or Sky & Telescope. But Tabby’s Star is a real thing. It’s a real star, first discovered back in 1890. It has an official name, KIC 8462852. It sits 1,480 light years away in the constellation Cygnus, visually a little past halfway between the star Deneb (the “head” of the “Northern Cross”) and its first bright star on the right arm. But don’t try to find it, as it can’t be seen by the naked eye. It can’t even be seen by my telescope (it requires a 5-inch or greater to be viewed).

What makes Tabby’s Star so special is that its brightness fluctuates on an irregular basis, up to 22 percent in brightness, something highly irregular in our universe.

What might cause this?

Well, in September of 2015, a group of “citizen scientists” searching for exoplanets, described the dimming problem in detail and offered some suggestions. Among those are –

   * An uneven ring of dust and debris orbiting the star

   * Some strange, currently unexplainable difference in the star’s photosphere

   * Similar to the ring of dust, a field of cold, dirty cometary fragments in highly eccentric orbits about the star

   * Or a large number of smaller masses circling about it in a tight formation

   * Or on a larger scale, perhaps Tabby’s Star is orbited by a single large planet with several oscillating rings of its own

   * Or for a more grimmer take, perhaps Tabby’s Star is in the slow process of devouring a large planet

But my favorite potential explanation, and those of many on the fringe, is –

   * Perhaps intelligent life is constructing a Dyson Sphere about the star.

Whoa.

What is a Dyson Sphere?

Picture a highly technologically evolved race in the process of constructing a sphere enclosing and encapsulating its star. Such a sphere would necessarily be a hundred or a thousand times the diameter of the star itself. And why would such a sphere be built around a sun? To capture a large portion of the energy radiating from the star, to power and fuel an interstellar civilization which had the means to do such an incredible feat of engineering.

Scientists convinced SETI – that part of NASA concerned with the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – to point its radio telescopes at Tabby’s Star in light of this last possibility. And for a whole two weeks they did so, and found no evidence of alien transmission of radio signals.

So the search, and the mental quest for what exactly is happening about Tabby’s Star continues …

Oh, and you’re probably wondering why it’s called Tabby’s Star. It’s for the lead author of that 2015 paper – astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. KIC 8462852 also goes by several other names. Boyajian’s Star, naturally. Also the WTF star, which can informally stand for “where’s the flux?” or “what the f***?” Some refer to it whimsically as LGM-2, in honor of the first pulsar discovered, which was casually known as LGM-1, for “little green men.”

What do I think?

Well, I can’t lie and say that the whole Dyson’s Sphere angle does not intrigue me to the point of shivers. But there’s this thing called Occam’s Razor …