Sunday, February 10, 2019

How did I miss hearing about the WTF Star?

I seem to have missed the announcements completely at the time, but I have only just found out about the so-called WTF Star.
Supposedly standing for "Where's The Flux" Star, although with tongue clearly planted firmly in cheek, the star is officially designated KIC 8462852 (KIC indicates the Kepler Input Catalog, meaning it was one of the hundreds of thousands of stars monitored by NASA's Kepler space telescope as part of the Planet Hunter project). In actual fact, the star has been known of since as early as 1895, but it is also now sometimes referred to as "Tabby's Star", after Tabetha Boyajian, who was responsible for characterizing the strange properties of the star over the period of Kepler's monitoring between 2009 to 2013, and comparing it with earlier observations.
Over 4 years of monitoring, the star seemed to inexplicably dim and brighten in an irregular pattern, overall growing slightly fainter over the period. This irregularity all but precludes the likelihood of the passage of a planet or planets in front of it, which is what the investigators were initially looking for. In fact, scientists are at a loss to explain the phenomenon, although many hypotheses have been put forward including colliding asteroids, comet swarms, the rings of a huge gas giant and planetary debris.
One possible explanation that particularly caught the scientific and public imagination, though, is that we may be observing some kind of enormous artificial structure. This led to some breathless media chatter of an "alien megastructure". It seems to me that there is very little compelling evidence for this particular explanation, but hey, I'm not an astrophysicist.
Either way, the star's unusual amd inexplicable activity puts it into the same category of such other unexplained astral phenomena as the "Wow! Signal", an unexplained and unrepeated powerful radio burst noted in 1977, which some have posited may be an alien broadcast (if so, I would ask, why was it not repeated?), and the 1991 "Oh My God Particle", a one-off, hugely powerful cosmic ray burst, which continues to defy explanation. (Actually, the Wow! Signal may now have been explained, and we may be on the trail of the Oh My God Particle as well).
All it says to me is that there are a whole lot of cosmic phenomena out there that we just don't understand. Why we should attribute them to "aliens" is a mystery to me.

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