Is bizarre star orbited by a swarm of ET megastructures? + Planets galore & Europa

[C C]

Kepler Data Yields A Bizarre Star - Is it Orbited By A Swarm Of ET Megastructures?

EXCERPT: The golden era of planet finding kicked into high gear with the launch of the Kepler Space Telescope in 2009. This spacecraft nestled into an Earth-trailing orbit, then fixed its eye on a small patch of sky -- and kept it there for four years. Within that patch were more than 150,000 stars, a kind of cross-section of an arm of our own Milky Way galaxy, as if Kepler were shining a searchlight into deep space. Kepler was looking for planetary transits -- the infinitesimally tiny dip in starlight that occurs when a planet crosses the face of the star it is orbiting.

[...] Kepler's transit watch paid off, identifying more than 4,000 candidate planets hundreds to thousands of light-years distant. So far, some 2,000 of those have been confirmed -- some of them Earth-sized planets that orbit within their star's so-called habitable zone, where liquid water can exist on a planet. Scientists are mining Kepler data, regularly turning up new planetary candidates and confirming earlier finds.

Within the Kepler Space Telesope's field of vision between two constellations—Cygnus the swan, and Lyra, the harp, is a strange star, KIC 8462852 star just above the Milky Way, noteable for the odd swarm of objects orbiting it. KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc in the astronomy department who oversees Planet Hunter at Yale told The Atlantic. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

[...] Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is preparing to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report. "I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, writing a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity....

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Planets Galore: How to See Uranus, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars

EXCERPT: Sometimes a whole bunch of different sky events happen over a very short period, giving skywatchers a chance to witness many unusual events in a few days. The next week or two is a case in point, with Uranus, Mercury, Jupiter and Mars are making notable appearances in the night sky....

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Did Comets Spark Alien Life in Europa's Oceans?

EXCERPT: If alien life swims in the ocean beneath Europa's icy surface, it might have got its start from comets cracking the icy shell to deliver vital pre-life ingredients, say researchers. New simulations show that a specific family of comets have the mass, velocity and opportunity to do the job -- penetrating the full range of likely Europan ice thicknesses. "It's one of the best candidates for an ecosystem," said Rónadh Cox of Williams College, Mass., regarding Europa's ocean. "But how do you get biological precursers into the ocean?"...

[Magical Realist]

[...] Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is preparing to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report. "I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Wow! If they are aliens, then they are far in advance of us that's for sure. Imagine an intelligent species who has evolved to the point of building vast structures in space and harnessing the energy from their own star. We need to scan them for the entire EMF spectrum though and not just radio waves. Who knows? They may be using gravity waves to communicate by now. Or, subspace frequencies as per Star Trek.

[Yazata]

Another example of bad science journalism.

This KIC 8462852 really is a mystery. But it doesn't generate interest among the general public until it's presented, in totally over-the-top fashion, as 'alien megastructures'.

It seems that this star displays very strange behavior detected by the Kepler orbiting telescope. It dims dramatically in brightness, seemingly irregularly. But Fourier analysis shows several periodicies embedded in the irregularity. Apparently the largest of these suggests something very large transiting across the face of the star, reducing the star's light by about 20%.

That's way too big for a planet.

I speculated elsewhere that it might be a brown dwarf, a small star-like body too small to have ignited fusion reactions. But it seems that brown dwarfs aren't believed to be much larger than Jupiter in diameter (just more dense at their cores) so that seemingly won't work. Not big enough to obscure 20% of the face of the star.

Nebel suggested that it might be a large planet with a huge and very extended ring system. But I'm not convinced that would be big enough either.

Another possibility is that the star itself might have giant Saturn-like rings. (An early star's planetary accretion disk would look like a ring system.) But could a stellar ring system produce the observed periodicities? That's probably doubtful too.

I also wondered whether there's any evidence that this might be a double star system with two stars, one much bigger and brighter, orbiting each other very closely, hot-Jupiter-style.

What they should be trying to get right now is Doppler wobble data on KIC 8462852. That would give some indication of what the mass of the objects orbiting this star are and might help resolve the number of massive objects and their orbital periods.

[Magical Realist]

I guess they didn't have time to muzzle Jason Wright the overexcited astronomer from Penn State University who proposed this explanation. Aliens? Ha! Who ever heard of such a thing!

[Yazata]

I guess they didn't have time to muzzle Jason Wright the overexcited astronomer from Penn State University who proposed this explanation. Aliens? Ha! Who ever heard of such a thing!

Muzzle? You can't keep the idiots quiet. Aliens was just one speculation about this thing, but it's what all of the "news" media ran with. (It sells newspapers and attracts eyes to webpages.)

From the point of view of laypeople, 'Scientists Detect Aliens!!' was the headline.

Astronomy got lost in all the sensationalist noise.

[Magical Realist]

“The chances are pretty high that what this is something completely natural,” said Seth Shostak, senior astronomer and director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, in a phone interview with Motherboard.

“But on the other hand, you don’t just blow it off,” he continued. “If you don’t check it out, you can’t be sure. In fact, even if you do check it out, you can’t be sure.”

With that said, we can make an educated guess about the structures by taking a closer look at the star. SETI is currently using the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) northeast of San Francisco to hone in on the star’s radio emissions, between the frequencies from 1 to 10 gigahertz. The goal is to pinpoint any strong signals within an unusually tight band of the radio spectrum, much like the WOW! Signal, which was received by SETI in 1977 and remains unexplained to this day.

“If you look at as much of the radio dial as possible, you can see if there’s any radio noise at a given spot on the dial,” he said. “Natural noise is all over the dial [...] but there’s nothing in nature that we know about that produces lots of radio noise just at a very narrow range of frequencies.”

This kind of narrow band signal, if discovered, would be substantial evidence that intelligent life is thriving in the KIC 8462852 system—or at least, that it was 1,480 years ago, when the light first started traversing the 1,480 lightyear distance between the star and Earth.

Indeed, the very feat of transmitting such a strong signal would require engineering capabilities that boggle the mind.

“This star is 1,480 light years away,” Shostak pointed out. “That’s about 300 times farther than the nearest stars. Any signals [from that distance] are 100,000 times weaker, and that’s a big factor. Even assuming that there is anybody there, they would have to have either a really hunky transmitter, for you to be able to hear it at that distance, or it would have to be deliberately focused in our direction.”

“Having said that, if you have a Dyson swarm that can intercept 20 percent of the light from your star, that’s a trillion times more energy than you’d need for this transmitter. So maybe energy is pretty cheap for these guys.”
======http://motherboard.vice.com/read/looking...ic-8462852