This is an update in my continuing coverage of KIC 8462852 or Tabby’s Star.
For the backstory see my videos on this channel or click the playlist to learn more about
this really strange star.
Which, by the way, continues to grow stranger.
It also seems almost poetic to make a video on this star today, since my very first video
in April of 2016 was on this topic, and the channel just yesterday surpassed 1 million
total views.
A milestone for sure, and thanks to all of you for that.
The star continues in it’s current period of short term dimming events that began in
May.
Initially, there were two large dips, Elsie and Celeste, so named by Dr. Boyajian’s
kickstarter supporters.
After those dips however the star seemed to hover at a sustained more or less half a percent
dimming in a kind of sawtooth pattern.
After that period of weirdness, the star seemed to recover back to something like nominal
but then dropped into another large dip going on right now, so far comparable in depth to
Elsie and Celeste and now seems to be entering a recovery, but it’s impossible to predict
and may well dip deeper.
But what’s most interesting right now is what seems like a new feature in the light
curve that I’m not aware we’ve seen before with this star.
Dr. Boyajian reported on the official blog for the star, link in the description below,
that what appears to have been a very short term deep dip occurred over a period of hours.
This fast dip was confirmed by a separate telescope in Spain and while the whole event
was not caught by the telescopes, they only caught the tail end, it seems to have been
real rather than some data artifact.
A similar event, though with less certainty, might have also have occurred on July 30th.
If these small, rapid dips turn out to be real, taken along with the saw toothing, that
would seem to be pretty weird behavior for a dust cloud, though other earlier data from
Elsie favored that explanation pretty strongly.
At this point, I simply have no idea what’s causing KIC 8462852 to behave this way, and
I would not be surprised if this isn’t settled years into the future.
The detection of an alien civilization is still on the table.
While I consider an explanation involving the activities of an alien civilization to
be highly improbable, that option may be rising a little in light of how weird the star is
acting lately, but like all other explanations so far advanced even the alien civilization
hypothesis falls really short.
When taken together, with this star we have something that produces a long-term over all
dimming trend over the course of at least a century, short-term dimming trends that
can go very deep, so far up to blocking 22 percent of the star’s light, and very short
term dimming trends that also seem to be able to go deep very rapidly, so far seen as subsets
of more longer term dims, only to return back to the previous dimming curve levels after
a period of hours.
That’s really strange and makes things harder and hard to pin down with this star and the
speed at which the long-term dimming trend is happening, really doesn’t look like someone
constructing a dyson sphere.
At that speed, you should see lots of waste heat and we do not.
So what could it be?
I still favor some kind of cold dust cloud, the indications for that were pretty strong,
it’s just one unlike any we’ve yet seen and is really complex and hard to understand.
But that introduces a possibility that I haven’t yet covered on this channel.
I take this story from the perspective of a science fiction writer, and while I always
caveat that this is most likely a natural phenomenon, overwhelmingly so, I can speculate
a little bit more than the scientists can, but still stay within the confines of reason
and reality.
So here goes.
In light of the long-term dimming trend, on its face whatever is happening at KIC 8462852
is happening very rapidly.
This is odd in itself, we’re used to the universe working on astronomical time scales,
and here it is not, it’s working on real time human time scales.
That in itself doesn’t mean anything, pulsars change behavior rapidly, supernovas happen,
an so on but speed does suggest that what you’re seeing doesn’t happen every day,
most astronomical phenomena move at a snail’s pace.
The activities of an alien civilization might also, nothing says that aliens are always
in a hurry.
But when you see something happening very rapidly that could, hypothetically, be due
to alien activity, whatever they’re doing, providing we can even understand it at all,
gets a bit constrained by physics and practicality.
That’s a problem for any alien explanation for the behavior of Tabby’s star.
But there is a possibility.
To build a Dyson sphere, or swarm, or megastructure of any type you need raw materials.
If the system that you’re going to use to generate power, or do whatever one might do
with megastructures, does not have substantial raw materials you might send them into the
system from elsewhere in a controlled manner.
That might make for a really strange light curve, perhaps something like the light curves
for this star.
This brings us back to the discovery of the long-term dimming trend by Shaeffer last year.
He calculated that to create the effects seen in the Kepler data, you would need 640,000
giant comets all orchestrated to pass into the system.
That is implausible, in nature.
It may not be implausible artificially if you choreograph the material to enter the
system as needed.
And, since it’s been travelling through deep space, your raw materials would be cold
upon entering the system, perhaps helping to explain the lack of infra red emissions.
I warn again, this is all sci fi speculation, grounded but entirely hypothetical, and subject
to me being all wet, and by its very nature any explanation for a phenomenon invoking
the activities of aliens is not on solid ground unless the evidence is absolutely unambiguous,
which is hardly the case here.
The bottom line is that we don’t know what an alien civilization could look like or what
it could do, we’ve never seen one.
But we can speculate, and that’s the problem.
You can come up with an alien explanation for just about anything weird you see in the
universe, you can form fit it because we know so little about the realities of such a thing.
As a result, odds are, any time one jumps to an alien conclusion, they tend to end up
wrong later.
This has happened before with the canals of Mars and other instances, but it’s interesting
to ponder the possibility nonetheless.
I still think this is some bizarre, unique dust phenomenon, but I also think we’re
moving into territory where any such explanation based on dust will be contentious for a good
long while.
But, this star has been contentious all along, so it should be no surprise that the story
of KIC 8462852 remains that of a mystery and an alien origin for it all still has not been
discounted.
Thanks for listening!
I am futurist and science fiction author John Michael Godier currently feeling a lot like
KIC 8462852, dim and a bit dippy after a long day battling the garden weeds and be sure
to check out my books at your favorite online book retailer and subscribe to my channel
for regular, in-depth explorations into the interesting, weird and unknown aspects of
this amazing universe in which we live.