• Astronomers Discover Another Mysterious Dimming Star
    34 replies, posted
https://www.sciencealert.com/tabby-s-star-has-a-friend-there-s-another-weird-mystery-star-in-town The light of EPIC 204376071, a star just 440 light-years from Earth, dimmed by up to 80 percent for an entire day. That's a huge amount of blocked light! Even the famously dimming 'alien megastructure' bust KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's star or Boyajian's star, has only dimmed by up to 22 percent. But EPIC 204376071 gets even more interesting. It dimmed quite suddenly, hitting a peak of 80 percent, then brightened again more slowly as whatever was blocking the light moved on. This is technically known as an occultation, and it was asymmetrical - the exit (egress) of the light-blocking something was twice as long as its entry (ingress), as you can see in the animation above.
I want to believe..
not aliens
simply epic
A ringed planet got in the way?
A ringed planet would literally have to be bigger than the star to cause that kind of dip. More likely it's a giant debris or dust cloud.
That's a space whale if I've ever seen one.
What kind of debris could be so massive?
You guys are all way off the mark - it's clearly a Type II civilization harnessing their star for energy.
Yep. Definitely aliens. Not all those other times but this time is different. Source: My dad works at SETI.
I think it was a fleet of star sized ships passing in front of it. It's the coolest, and only logical conclusion.
What ever it was it was massive enough to block 80% of a stars light from over 400 light years away. Either its a really massive object near the star or aaa smaller object nearer to us(most likely)
Very doubtful. The light was blocked by 80% over pretty much a full day. Something closer to us would zip past fairly quickly from our perspective. Kepler will just have to view for another 160 days to be sure though. If it's in the orbit of that star, we'll see it return.
What a garbage article. It reads like it was written by a teenager going through a ‘fuck yeah science’ phase. Here’s the actual paper https://academic.oup.com/mnras/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/mnras/stz537/5362657?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Why? our moon isn't bigger than the sun
Our moon is almost 400x as close as an object that's 400x the size of it, allowing it to occlude it only because it's astronomically very very close, the object doing this would have to be quite distant from the object it's occluding and quite slow moving to occlude it for so long if thats the case
The distance from us to this star in question is vast enough to make any distance between a planet in that solar system and the star itself almost entirely negligible. If it's in the solar system of that star, it's absolutely fucking gigantic in scale, if it isn't, and it's somewhere in the space in between, I reckon we will never see it again.
Yes, hi, perspective wants to talk to you
Yeah, dude I get it
It was a space 🥜
You sure?
You realize the moon is really close to us, right? Making its appearing significantly larger in proportion than anything else in the night sky.
It's those Tiyanki space whales!
You're literally named after the brightest star in the sky so I hope that was a joke.
I just didn't take the angles into account. Not sure if people just aren't reading replies or just have a lust for being right/correcting
Well, it's Facepunch - what do you expect? At any rate, it was more just a chance to make a joke. No offense intended.
A "star sized ship" couldn't possibly exist Anything that big would collapse upon its own mass and become a star or a black hole. If the paper says "it's probably space dust" then it's probably space dust.
Remember that mass is important here. If there was an extremely light, strong novel material, a star-sized ship could potentially exist, it is just highly improbable.
Its actually pretty easy to obscure a significant fraction of a star's light using giant mirrors which would not need to be all that thick or tough, the issue is that you'd only want to do that if you had something like a ladder or ring world.
Dyson shell! Those space reptiles beat us to it again.
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.