Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky

[Dalex]

Title is direct quote from The Independent.
Long story short Kepler detected a star that is non-periodically obscured by, what appears to be numerous objects.
In addition to that, the stars luminosity is decreased by 17% every ~750 days,
since the star if an F-type roughly as large as our sun it is kind of worrying.
Even brown dwarf wouldn't obscure it by that much.


Arxiv link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf

[Rynn]

It's an interesting paper that seems to have covered a lot of bases. I can't stand the news paper title, it makes it seem like there is evidence of artificial constructs. In reality there's an absence of evidence for what it is. This seems like an "alien of the gaps" fallacy.

[Dalex]

It's an interesting paper that seems to have covered a lot of bases. I can't stand the news paper title, it makes it seem like there is evidence of artificial constructs. In reality there's an absence of evidence for what it is. This seems like an "alien of the gaps" fallacy.

Yeah kind of... Thats why I linked the paper so people have the original source.
The big point is that no matter what it turns out being, it is very unlikely.
If there are indeed comets in such number than it begs answer why it happened now. You know the old falling gymnast abstraction.

[Fsci123]

I would hope this is some sort of Dyson swarm but due to the lack of infrared peak, I'm sticking with the comet hypothesis for now.

[totaleclipse1985]

IF (with a big capital IF) it is part of an alien dyson/matroshka node, the lack of an infrared peak would be more than logical as such a node would use the energy so efficently that it would only emit radiation marginally above the level of the background radiation. No instrument sensible enough to really detect this has been pointed at the star yet. Nevertheless, with a full matroshka node under construction you would probably expect a gradual dimming of the entire star as small elements of the swarm get added on all kinds of orbits and positions. So maybe it is a matroshka micronode deployed around a jupiter brain or something - this could fit the 22% obstruction meassurement. If they don't want to disassemble all planets / keep their home planet intact, this could be an explanation.
Or maybe a more compact node satisfies their demand for speed more than a streched out full matrioshka brain. Perhaps generally advanced civilisations start out transforming their home planet to computronim and then adding even more mass to their home planet to grow further. I mean, we are even nowadays used to real-time communications. I could imagine it would suck big time for a post-biological civilisation to wait 3 hours for a data transmission. So perhaps they would go as compact as possible - at least until they develop wormhole technology or any other means to transcend the speed of light. However - just some wild speculation, don't take it to seriously

[chris0033547]

Here is another paper on the subject:

http://www2.astro.psu.edu/~jtwright/Dyson/GHAT4.pdf

Section 4 of the paper deals with KIC 8462852.

[stevebowers]

One suggestion I've seen is that this might be deliberate signalling using shades.

This is, of course, an idea we explored at Orion's Arm some time ago
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48fa7379af7e0

[Fsci123]

Could gravitational lensing caused by a microscopic black hole cause dimming effects like this?

[stevebowers]

I don't think so; part of the problem with the light-curves of this star is that the shadowing objects don't seem to be spherical, but a black hole would probably produce a symmetrical effect. One possibility I have considered is that some of these planets are double objects- maybe rocheworlds. But there appear to be eight of them; could there be four double planets in a single system?

[stevebowers]

Maybe some of the planets have very big and very dense ring systems.