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 …

 

Gettin’ Old

 

Argh. Stress at work has given me heartburn; I’m waking up so often during the night I’ve taken to taking Tums proactively before bed. And yesterday, while doing nothing except turning my torso gently to the right, I seemed to have pulled a muscle in the lower left spinal region. While laying on the floor last night watching TV with the ladies I rolled over and it erupted in a piercing bolt of painful lightning all up and down my poor back that I could hardly move. Last night I slept terribly; woke at 2:15 am and went down to the basement office and watched, among other things, 1963’s Godzilla vs. King Kong on the internet.

I have been eating well again, and I think I lost a few pounds. I walked a few times and hurled the weights early in the week, too. But it seems like it’s one of those one-step-forward, two-steps-back kinda things. The more progress I make towards living a healthy lifestyle, the more work I find I need to do.

Or maybe it was just a string of bad luck. The work stress seems to be solving itself, and I should have some resolution Monday. Hopefully it won’t affect my weekend circadian rhythms. That is, if I’m going in to work, as we’re expecting snow here in northern New Jersey Sunday night into Tuesday morning.

On a better note, I finished Craig Nelson’s Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness. What a fantastic book! In my World War II readings, I discovered that books in the subject generally fall into two broad categories: those that take a bird’s-eye view, focusing on strategy, battle tactics, the big personalities, the massed movements of armed forces, global repercussions, and those that focus on the man-on-the-ground, the soldier and his experiences, the awful events faced by civilians caught in the crossfire, and how such battles and policies affected the populations involved. Bird’s-eye view versus man-on-the-ground. What Nelson’s book does is create the best balance between these two angles of the twenty or so books I’ve read to date. I highly recommend it, and will keep an eye out for more of his work. There are a couple of lectures of his on the internet I listened to during my commute to work that I’d recommend also.

On the other hand, I’m having difficulty making headway into Red Mars. This is the book that’s lived the longest on my shelves, the elder statesman of the forty or fifty SF paperbacks I have on deck. I first cracked it around 2001, two decades ago, and only made it through the prologue. Now I’m around 160 pages in, almost a third of the way through, and it’s still slow going. But I’m keeping an open mind and will review it later next month.

My youngest daughter, age twelve, alternates indoor soccer with weight training at a local gym. Last night after dropping her off, my oldest and I drove to B&N, where I picked up, entirely on whims, two slim water-themed SF paperbacks (I’ve been reading too many time-consuming epics of late). One is The Maracot Deep, a tale about Atlantis by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the other The Water of Thought by Fred Saberhagen, something about alien water that gives people weird psychological powers and/or makes them go mad (?). They’re now the newest denizens of the On Deck circle, and may their shelf life be, uh, a fraction of that of Red Mars.

I also unearthed a high school notebook of mine, a record of what was going through my head forty years ago. Thumbing through it, I realized I just hit a gold mine. I discovered dozens and dozens of character names, perfect for the novel I’ve been planning out these past couple of weeks. Bad guy names, good guy names, background guy names. (It’s a novel based on World War II, so there are lots of guys as opposed to chicks.)

Broke out the electric guitar a couple times this week. Wrote another composition – I now think I have something like six albums worth of material – three CDs in today’s lingo. (Do the young ’uns even buy CDs anymore? Don’t think so …) Couple new things I’ve been fiddling with is “Motherless Children” – known to people my age as the theme from “Not Necessarily the News,” and the Dio-led Black Sabbath song “Neon Knights.” Among other stuff.

Well, that’s enough of an update. More meaty stuff to follow in the next couple of days.

 

A Joke for Our Times

 

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: Because he saw me walking maskless down the sidewalk during my morning exercise.

 

 

Yeah, I know. Not really funny. Kinda sad, actually …