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Not comets or anything else.

“Either one of our refutations has some hidden loophole, or some theorist needs to come up with some other proposal,” Bradley Schaefer, an astronomer at Louisiana State University, told the New Scientist. “The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot. But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas.”

Still no better explanation than aliens.

I love that the best theory they have right now is a Dyson Sphere being built.

The changes in brightness being used to find exoplanets like earth are in the 0.01% sort of range. This is an overall 3% decline in brightness in a short time frame with spikes of 14%. That's not weird, that's inconceivable. That's being sucked in by the Starkiller Base shit right there.

There are stars which have dimming spikes that are more drastic than this one, but they're all of known and predictable periodicity and none of them have hit their main sequence yet. In addition, those spikes tend to be extreme because of all the debris and crap floating around in young star systems. Well, there's provably no evidence of any of that within the nearby vicinity of this one. Nor is there evidence of a massive collision of two or more celestial bodies that's big enough to block out enough light. The total surface area for a comet swarm that you'd need to do that is, turn to a pun, astronomical. Not to deflate anyone's alien theories, either, but there aren't any tech-related radio signals detectable by SETI. The most startling sentence I can find is this:

The first major dip, on 5 March 2011, obscured the star's brightness by up to 15%, and the other (on 28 February 2013) by up to 22%. In comparison, a planet the size of Jupiter would only obscure a star of this size by 1%, indicating that whatever is blocking light during the star's major dips is not a planet, but rather something covering up to half the width of the star.

That's insane. Elder god, Cthulu-scale insane. And that's not using shitty estimates from equally shitty photographs that are a century old, that's five years ago.

but there aren't any tech-related radio signals detectable by SETI.

To be fair, they literally, just started looking yesterday or today. There's an article out there today about that very thing.

Leisher wrote:

but there aren't any tech-related radio signals detectable by SETI.

To be fair, they literally, just started looking yesterday or today. There's an article out there today about that very thing.

No, they've been looking since last October. Know what they found?

Not according to the article I read at work today.

They're also looking for laser communication.

Although, they admit that perhaps there's communication methods they don't know about.

Leisher wrote:Not according to the article I read at work today.

Well, then it's bullshit. Tell them I said so.

They're also looking for laser communication.

The first pass was a two-week, fairly intensive scan ... and it was only radio.

Although, they admit that perhaps there's communication methods they don't know about.

Yeah, that springs to mind. But absolutely zero radio sigs coming from there isn't a good indicator. If it's not used for communications, you'd think there'd be some kind of buzz on the band somewhere.

I'd imagine any civilization advanced enough to start needing to capture that much of the power of their star will have first spent a lot of time optimizing energy loss in their major technologies. For us to see it it would have to be fairly powerful, and they may be too advanced to be leaking that much power in our direction.

Well, then it's bullshit. Tell them I said so.

I'll try to dig it up for you tomorrow. I think it was NASA or somebody, so you can write them and tell them how to do their jobs.

Yeah, that springs to mind. But absolutely zero radio sigs coming from there isn't a good indicator. If it's not used for communications, you'd think there'd be some kind of buzz on the band somewhere.

1. Always remember we can only look for what we know and understand. Might be shit out there that we don't even think to look for.
2. In other news, the Russians might have found something elsewhere.

Leisher wrote:I'll try to dig it up for you tomorrow. I think it was NASA or somebody, so you can write them and tell them how to do their jobs.

What job? Launching boring-ass deep space probes when we should be setting up fucking moonbases by now?

2. In other news, the Russians might have found something elsewhere.

And no one else can seem to locate it. Surprise, surprise.

My official guess: It's actually a binary star... or almost. There's a large dark mass, not quite big enough to fuse, or maybe not made of hydrogen, or maybe just a brown dwarf, and it and the star are orbiting each other.

GORDON wrote:My official guess: It's actually a binary star... or almost. There's a large dark mass, not quite big enough to fuse, or maybe not made of hydrogen, or maybe just a brown dwarf, and it and the star are orbiting each other.

If that were true, the data would be more periodic. I'm sticking with aliens.

GORDON wrote:My official guess: It's actually a binary star... or almost. There's a large dark mass, not quite big enough to fuse, or maybe not made of hydrogen, or maybe just a brown dwarf, and it and the star are orbiting each other.

You could detect the gravitational pull for an object half the size of the sun. Far as any instruments can tell, there's a whole shitload of nothing even close to the total mass and area you'd need.

Theory not involving aliens.

Plausible explanation.

“We propose that the secular dimming behavior is the result of the inspiral of a planetary body or bodies into KIC 8462852,” researchers from Columbia University and UC Berkley said in a new research paper.

If the star did consume a planet, it could explain the unusual light pattern, researchers said.