Odin
ANTISOLIPSIST
I find this kind of stuff really exciting. Posted below are a couple articles on a strange star about fifteen hundred light years away that is exhibiting some peculiar behavior. One theory. An advanced megastructure orbiting the star... proof of... yea you got it! ANCIENT ALIENS!
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::eyepatch::
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...r-say-huge-unknown-object-blocking-light.html
Wednesday, Oct 14th 2015
Have researchers discovered an alien MEGASTRUCTURE? 'Bizarre' star could be surrounded by a Dyson sphere built by extraterrestrials, researchers claim
Researchers have revealed a 'bizarre' star they say could be surrounded by a huge alien mega structure.
KIC 8462852, located 1,480 light-years away, was monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
Now researchers say they cannot explain strange fluctuations in the light it emits - leading some to claim it could have a huge alien megastructure in front of it.
Scroll down for video
+4
KIC 8462852, located 1480 light-years away, and has produced a series of bizarre light fluctuations researchers have not been able to conclusively explain.
'We'd never seen anything like this star,' Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic.
HOW COULD ALIENS HARNESS THE POWER OF ENTIRE STARS?
A proposed method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.
First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.
They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.
If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.
But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.
Source: All About Space magazine
'It was really weird.
'We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.'
She recently published a paper in the online journal arxiv outlining the possible causes - and discounting many of them.
'Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,'Boyajian and her team at the crowdsourced astronomy site planet hunters found.
There, researchers flagged the star as bizarre as early as 2011.
'The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 days,' they say.
The team also looked at possible explanations, such as faulty data or a recent collision.
'In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the mysterious events in the Kepler light curve, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand,' they wrote.
'By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event.'
However, some experts say the real cause could be something far more exciting.
+4
'Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,'Boyajian and her team at the crowdsourced astronomy site planet hunters found.
'Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,' Penn State astronomer Jason Wright told The Atlantic, 'but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.'
Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a 'swarm of megastructures,' perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
+4
One theory for an advanced alien race is that they might harness the power of an entire star, known as a Dyson Sphere (illustrated). However, if such a structure existed, it is theorised that we would be able to detect its infrared signature - but a recent study found no such evidence
Wright is now working with the SETI Institute in Berkeley and Boyajian to develop a proposal to point a large radio telescope (either the NRAO's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia or the Parkes Observatory scope in Australia) at the star, and listen for a 'hum' of alien technology.
SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars.
'The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,' Wright has said of his research.
+4
The 100 metre Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia (above) will help the scientists make the most extensive serach of the universe for signs of intelligent life yet conducted. The team hope to get time on it to further examine the mysterious star.
'Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, communication, or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths,' Wright said.
'This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on.'
THE FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
Scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos under the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) program since the 1960s.
Initially it was conducted on the fringe of radio astronomy, with just short amounts of time obtained on relatively small radio telescopes.
However, in 1984 the Seti Institute was established to provide a coordinated approach to the search, using radio telescopes as permanent ‘ears’ to listen for alien signals.
The project however suffered a set back in 1994 when NASA funding to SETI was cut and it now seeks support from private sources instead.
The project has yet to detect any positive signs of signals from intelligent life, but some scientists have predicted it could happen within the next 20 years.
However, the project has also been criticized for being overly optimistic despite not receiving any signals in the past 30 years.
Recently scientists proposed taking a more active approach by broadcasting signals to nearby stars in the hope of getting a response.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.
In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.
The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.
But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.
It appears to be mature.
And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.
published a paper describing the star’s bizarre light pattern. Several of the citizen scientists are named as co-authors. The paper explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.
The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star’s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.
But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.
And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “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. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.
Assuming all goes well, the first observation would take place in January, with the follow-up coming next fall. If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner. “If we saw something exciting, we could ask the director for special allotted time on the VLA,” Wright told me. “And in that case, we’d be asking to go on right away.”
In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky, aimed between the swan and the lyre, where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
And one more article from popular science.
http://www.popsci.com/have-we-detected-alien-megastructures-around-distant-star
:
::
::
:::eyepatch::
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencet...r-say-huge-unknown-object-blocking-light.html
Wednesday, Oct 14th 2015
Have researchers discovered an alien MEGASTRUCTURE? 'Bizarre' star could be surrounded by a Dyson sphere built by extraterrestrials, researchers claim
- KIC 8462852 is located 1480 light-years away from Earth
- Has produced a series of bizarre light fluctuations team cannot explain
- One theory is that a vast megastructure is obscuring the light from it
Researchers have revealed a 'bizarre' star they say could be surrounded by a huge alien mega structure.
KIC 8462852, located 1,480 light-years away, was monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
Now researchers say they cannot explain strange fluctuations in the light it emits - leading some to claim it could have a huge alien megastructure in front of it.
Scroll down for video
+4
KIC 8462852, located 1480 light-years away, and has produced a series of bizarre light fluctuations researchers have not been able to conclusively explain.
'We'd never seen anything like this star,' Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic.
HOW COULD ALIENS HARNESS THE POWER OF ENTIRE STARS?
A proposed method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.
First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.
They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.
If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.
But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.
Source: All About Space magazine
'It was really weird.
'We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.'
She recently published a paper in the online journal arxiv outlining the possible causes - and discounting many of them.
'Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,'Boyajian and her team at the crowdsourced astronomy site planet hunters found.
There, researchers flagged the star as bizarre as early as 2011.
'The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 days,' they say.
The team also looked at possible explanations, such as faulty data or a recent collision.
'In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the mysterious events in the Kepler light curve, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand,' they wrote.
'By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event.'
However, some experts say the real cause could be something far more exciting.
+4
'Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,'Boyajian and her team at the crowdsourced astronomy site planet hunters found.
'Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,' Penn State astronomer Jason Wright told The Atlantic, 'but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.'
Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a 'swarm of megastructures,' perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
+4
One theory for an advanced alien race is that they might harness the power of an entire star, known as a Dyson Sphere (illustrated). However, if such a structure existed, it is theorised that we would be able to detect its infrared signature - but a recent study found no such evidence
Wright is now working with the SETI Institute in Berkeley and Boyajian to develop a proposal to point a large radio telescope (either the NRAO's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia or the Parkes Observatory scope in Australia) at the star, and listen for a 'hum' of alien technology.
SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars.
'The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization's technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,' Wright has said of his research.
+4
The 100 metre Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia (above) will help the scientists make the most extensive serach of the universe for signs of intelligent life yet conducted. The team hope to get time on it to further examine the mysterious star.
'Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, communication, or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths,' Wright said.
'This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on.'
THE FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE
Scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos under the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) program since the 1960s.
Initially it was conducted on the fringe of radio astronomy, with just short amounts of time obtained on relatively small radio telescopes.
However, in 1984 the Seti Institute was established to provide a coordinated approach to the search, using radio telescopes as permanent ‘ears’ to listen for alien signals.
The project however suffered a set back in 1994 when NASA funding to SETI was cut and it now seeks support from private sources instead.
The project has yet to detect any positive signs of signals from intelligent life, but some scientists have predicted it could happen within the next 20 years.
However, the project has also been criticized for being overly optimistic despite not receiving any signals in the past 30 years.
Recently scientists proposed taking a more active approach by broadcasting signals to nearby stars in the hope of getting a response.
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/
The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy
Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
- Oct 13, 2015
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.
In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.
The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.
But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.
It appears to be mature.
And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash.
published a paper describing the star’s bizarre light pattern. Several of the citizen scientists are named as co-authors. The paper explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.
The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star’s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.
But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.
And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.
When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “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. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.
If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.
Assuming all goes well, the first observation would take place in January, with the follow-up coming next fall. If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner. “If we saw something exciting, we could ask the director for special allotted time on the VLA,” Wright told me. “And in that case, we’d be asking to go on right away.”
In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky, aimed between the swan and the lyre, where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852
And one more article from popular science.
http://www.popsci.com/have-we-detected-alien-megastructures-around-distant-star
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