It it isn't comets what else could it be? Could it really be aliens? We've looked for signals but would aliens even know about us? http://finance.yahoo.com/news/bizarre-looking-star-just-got-210900508.html That bizarre-looking star just got a lot weirder, and yes it could be aliens Business Insider By Jessica Orwig 54 minutes ago  View gallery .dyson sphere (Danielle Futselaar/SETI International) Three months ago, news broke that a giant "alien megastructure" could exist around a bizarre-looking star 1,500 light years away. While the prospect of aliens was first launched by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, almost everyone in the astronomy community agreed that the chances that this was the case were "very low." Now, the latest investigations into this strange star by Louisiana State University astronomer Bradley Schaefer have re-ignited the alien theory, New Scientist reported. What makes this star, called KIC8462852, so bizarre is the drastic changes in light we see from it over time. Many stars experience temporary fluctuations in brightness, increasing and decreasing in luminosity over time, but KIC8462852's changes are severe by comparison. Between 2009 and 2013, astronomers using the Kepler space telescope discovered that it would sometimes lose up to 20% of its brightness. What's more, the changes didn't follow any obvious pattern. That would suggest something gigantic must be blocking the light at random times, meaning it couldn't be a planet or other regular orbiting object because that would generate a distinct pattern of dimming light. It must be something that changes shape over time, thereby blocking different levels of light at random intervals. Surprise: It's probably not comets An alien megastructure, called a Dyson swarm, was suggested as one explanation for what scientists have observed, but the most likely reason astronomers came up with was comets a giant family of them. But Shaefer says not so fast. The comet-family idea was reasonably put forth as the best of the proposals, even while acknowledging that they all were a poor lot, Schaefer told New Scientist. But now we have a refutation of the idea, and indeed, of all published ideas. To make his discovery, Schaefer had to dig deep down into the astronomy archives at Harvard. It turns out, astronomers have data on KIC8462852 dating back as far as 1890. By analyzing over 1,200 measurements of this star's brightness taken from 1890 through 1989, Schaefer found that the irregular dimming of KIC8462852 has been going on for over 100 years. Schaefer published his findings in the online pre-print server arxiv.org. What's more, he explains in his paper that this "century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century," which he said is "completely implausible."
Y'know, it could just be a really really really variable star, of a sort which hasn't been discovered before. What we once thought was impossible is regularly proven possible in astronomy; for instance, we didn't know that Y-type brown dwarfs (which are insanely cold, but have the makeup of stars) could possibly exist before we discovered brown dwarfs with surface temperatures of 27°C.
Well I always like the idea of aliens being behind this mystery. It gives some wonder to the Universe.
Scientists are doing this smart, rule out an other possibility as we observe this as a species. But think about it even a lesser version of a Dyson Sphere would take massive resources and technology well over our knowledge and the resources likely of a large colonizing civilization. We couldn't make one with just the resources of our planet.
Occam's razor - the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The simplest explanation = this is a naturally occurring phenomenon, as yet unknown. Deducing this is some sort of structure to harvest the energy from the host Sun is certainly not the simplest explanation. This would require many things. 1. A planet the right distance from the host Star to support life 2. A planet with lots of liquid water 3. If life did exist on this planet, and the planet was able to support life... evolution...a basically random process of mutating DNA would need to have created an intelligence capable of building a mega-structure so vast it rivals anything our own species has ever built. It took us roughly 4.6 billion years to get what we are. So on top of everything else discussed above, billions of years would be needed to hopefully go from random mutations of DNA to a sentient life form far superior to our own. I think people's imagination is getting carried away. The only real evidence there is so far is an irregular dimming of a distant star; a phenomenon not observed before. Quasars, as an example, still mystify scientists even 50 years after they were discovered. We're mere children seeing monsters in the shadows.
This is where we humans tend to put on our narrow goggles. There has been much debate within the scientific community about this because we keep using our own criteria as a basis for possible Alien life. "If we can't live there then nothing else can" type mentality that may or may not be true for all we know. In spite of our advancements in technology we still have no real idea how the Universe works. We don't know if Earth is special or common in the sense that we have life here OR if the type of life we have here is even "normal" by the Universe's standards. For all we know our ability to live on a rocky planet with a temperate climate could be extreme with many other species living in Gas Giants or planets as hot as Venus or cold as Pluto. We also have no idea if our own evolutionary time scale is fast or slow or average. Other species could have gone from microbes to Star Trek in a thousand years while it has taken humans hundreds of millions. I believe that acknowledging the possibility that our home planet might not be normal is a big step in our search for ET. One of my biggest pet peeves with science documentaries on Exoplanets is when I hear the narrator say something like "This world is a frozen wasteland, NOTHING could possibly live here". No, WE can't possibly live there. WE aren't everything, we might be but we have no idea. Now of course it does make logical sense to search for other planets that are similar to the only one we know of that can sustain life. But that is still narrow minded because we humans have made that same mistake even on our own planet. Until recently we thought that it was impossible for anything to live in the far depths of the oceans and then were shocked when we randomly stumbled across organisms living on the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Problem is that like you said the imagination is infinite. If we used the logic I mentioned above then we could literally come up with an infinite number of possibilities. So in order to cut down on that we try to search for what we know can sustain the types of life we have here on Earth because unless we have a basis from which to start we will just be searching blindly. We don't have the resources to do that. But in my mind I believe that if we ever do find Alien life out there it will be like NOTHING we could have ever imagined. I really think that Earth is just one type of planet that can sustain a certain type of life in the Universe just like Oceans are a certain type of environment that can sustain a certain type of life here. Nobody in the world could have imagined and drawn on a piece of paper many of those weird looking sea creatures we stumble upon when we send submersibles to the depths of our oceans. I think it'll be like that if we ever stumble across Alien life. I don't think they'll be humanoid or even remotely close to humanoid, I think they will be something that even our most fascinating Sci Fi writers couldn't come up with.
Just 113 years ago we figured out heavier than air flight! The first general purpose computer was completed 70 years ago. Personal computers were developed 36 years ago. The first exoplanets were discovered 24 years ago. The pace of change has accelerated. To assume that it will take billions more years for a superior sentience to evolve is not based upon science. To a man living 2000 years ago our ability to see things happening on the opposite side of the planet virtually as they are happening would be godlike. Our ability to send a bolt out of the sky to kill someone in a remote mountain village would be godlike. But those things are a reality for us today. The odds of there being not only life, but sentient life, in the universe is actually far greater than the odds that we are most advanced sentient life in the entire universe. So no, I am not discounting this as potentially being evidence of alien life given the probabilities.
Just because scientists currently cannot account for the irregular and significant dimming does not require us to start making assumptions. We can guess that whatever technology we have is being directed to this spot so potential new information every day...
It's probably a large solar system with many large planets, or perhaps even a binary solar system that is just confusing and causing no pattern because each sun has their own planets? - that would make a lot of sense.... It would take us 100+ years just to figure that out depending on the orbits of the planets... IDK, interesting tho... I would need more information to guess but the "wobble" of the star would certainly be helpful...
I always thought the same thing...... For all we know Earth would be way too hot or cold for an alien....... We have basically based all our theories on ourselves, on what we could tolerate, just like we base all laws of physics on Earth......
This just in, from a news story I just read, this star has been dimming for 100 years, and that is consistent with a Dyson swarm. So are the aliens really building a structure around the star to produce energy? Or is this just a new stellar phenomenon that no one's seen before? Well in any case this is quite a new thing in its own right. This is going to fill textbooks for centuries... Star dimming for 100 years with irregular dips in brightness consistent with Dyson swarm construction and orbiting of partial Dyson Swarm
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure...in other words it's science fiction. For one thing evidence points out this thing would need to be the size of Jupiter to do what it's doing. Are some suggesting an alien species built something the size of Jupiter to harvest energy from their host star? You might as well suggest it's a giant space unicorn and the horn is irregularly dimming the starlight.
All of our technological and space advances have been in the past 200 years so if a civilization can manage to survive for 1000's or millions of years, building a gigantic space station/vehicle is certainly possible. Humans have no choice but to live on Earth, however, if we had a choice to live on a space station, one that can be easily expanded for each new resident, I can see how this might evolve over 1000's of years...
A hypothetical Dyson Sphere this large would be giving off a detectable infra-red signature... No such signature has been detected. A hypothetical Dyson Sphere this large would require signalling of some sort to construct it. No sentient signal has been detected. There is virtually no evidence whatsoever that what is causing an anomalous dimming of a star is sourced from a sentient life form. Stating it as such is purely conjecture. As of today, there is virtually no evidence of life outside of Earth...none. Stating it as such is purely conjecture. I prefer going on substantive evidence and not conjecture...that is how Science is done. If there's an hypothesis that what is causing the dimming is from an alien megastructure, evidence will need to be provided beyond an anomalous dimming, which could be sourced from a multitude of as yet undiscovered naturally occurring phenomenon...including, as an example, this star is an oblate spheroidal shape. As planets pass across the different regions during an orbit, the amount of flux dips in differing ways There are plenty of people who think we never walked on the Moon, that the government is hiding alien technology at Area 51. I don't take any of that seriously without evidence to substantiate an hypothesis. So I'm not going to waste any further time discussing it with anybody on this thread...unless evidence is actually provided from a verifiable source that whatever is causing the dimming is from a sentient life form.
Two of the dips, on day 1520 and 1570 of Kepler's mission, are shown having a similar shape but a different magnitude. Despite their differences, both curves follow the shape of a planet travelling across a brightened pole, If the first planet is large it could block out around 20% of the star's disc, while a smaller planet could occlude just 8% of it The simplest solution to an unknown is usually the best...paraphrasing Occam's Razor. You don't need to plug variables along the lines of an advanced sentient life form building a massive structure in space to more efficiently harness the host star's energy. Hypothesis...The star is an oblate spheroid...causing planets to orbit in an irregular way leading to an irregular dimming of starlight than we would normally observe. If the first planet is large it could block out around 20% of the star's disc, while a smaller planet could occlude just 8% of it. The second dip may be shorter because the smaller planet is moving faster and orbiting closer to the star. Much more plausible and follows Occam's Razor. .
That's from wikipedia.^^^^^^^^^^^^ Source: http://io9.gizmodo.com/the-mysterious-phenomenon-of-gravity-darkening-1638441719^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Now is what is being observed a result of the combination of gravity darkening and planets rotating around an oblate sherioid shaped star? I can't say for sure. But think about this...what will motiviate the average Joe out there to click on a website..thus generating views. "We're not alone, evidence of Alien Megastructure found orbitng a distant star" or something more scientific "sounding". The latter would probably not interest the average Joe out there. So basic human psychology can be applied...you want folks to click on an article...make it appealing, make it exciting. None of this, of course, means we can for sure 100% state this is not an alien structure built by a sentient life form. I certainly can't say it isn't with complete cerainty. However before I would leap to that sort of complex solution I'd exhaust all other plausible explanations for solvng an astronomical mystery. In the 1960s, after quasars were discovered, the same thing.... "We're not alone, starnge space signal discovered from an alien race" Well you get the idea...sensationalism sells. Science, not so much. People want to believe in advanced sentient life forms...perhaps to escape the mundane here on Earth. Certainly we might not be alone, but to date; no evidence exists that there is life outside of this little blue marble. It is highly unlikely that we are alone, but until substantive evidence is found of life..out there in the vastness of space. I'll wait. I won't succumb to click bait, wherein scientific inquiry is replaced by the motivation to get people to view a website. Mega-structure found...is nothing more than click bait given what we know, collectively, about this dimming star.
You know that Dyson truly did not like the theory of a 'complete' sphere constructed around a star believing it would be impossible and instead preferred a theory about swarms of structures placed in orbit around a star? If there was a reason for intelligent beings to vacate their planet(s) and start a life in space, over long periods of time, as the structures were completed, less and less of their star's light will be emitting. Yes, this is 100% theory but nonetheless feasible...
I agree! I like the idea that intelligent aliens are perhaps working behind the scenes to help prepare the earth for a vastly better economy and society than we have now. http://www.politicalforum.com/other-off-topic-chat/338698-will-ufos-assist-bringing-peace-world.html Will UFO's assist in bringing peace to the world????? I personally am now wide open to this possibility...... but I sure wasn't ready for the idea until I read this part of the NDE account of Christian Andreason: http://www.allaboutchristian.com/spirituality/
On the other hand we humans are getting awfully close to creating A. I. and once that happens.......... the entire formula of what is and what isn't possible is totally altered?! http://www.politicalforum.com/relig...ral-implications-artificial-intelligence.html Religious and Moral Implications of Artificial Intelligence.
