Wednesday, January 3, 2018

Today, astronomer Tabetha Boyajian announced a paper detailing ????.

The Tabby’s taking a scheduled dip and not to kill fleas. On the night of May 18 into 19, a robotic 14-inch Celestron telescope at Farborn Observatory in Arizona watched Tabby’s star lose brightness by a dramatic 3% and counting, confirming a prediction that the star would undergo its unusual dimming events once every 750 days. Other major telescope projects and citizen astronomers have confirmed these findings. The dip was complex and continued through to Sunday, after a brief rise in brightness over the weekend. It seems to have ended now, with tweets from Jason Wright reminding us that the dips came in clumps before and from Tabby Boyajian saying “will we have a flurry of dips to come? Stay tuned!”

Tabby’s star, also called Boyajian’s Star and officially designated KIC 8462852, is an F-class star in GENERAL AREA,

“Tabby’s star… went through a lot of very strange dimming events that got up to 22% dimmer during the Kepler Mission, and since then we’ve been eagerly awaiting another dip. And the reason that we’ve been waiting for that is that whatever is causing the star to get dimmer will leave a spectral fingerprint behind,” said Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University. So if it’s a lot of dust between us and the star that’s passing by, it should block more blue light than red light. If there’s gas in that dust, that gas should absorb very specific wavelengths. So we’ve been eager to see one of these changes, these dips in the star, so we can take the spectra.” He also addressed space fans via Twitter: “ALERT:@tsboyajian’s star is dipping This is not a drill. Astro tweeps on telescopes in the next 48 hours: spectra please!”

The Kepler project monitors more than 150,000 stars with the primary goal of detecting exoplanets. If a star gets dimmer but then recovers, a planet may have passed in front of it. But Tabby’s star is showing something else. An exoplanet can cause its sun to dim by perhaps 1% and not for very long. Some of Tabby’s dips have been this mild, but others have hit 20% and lasted weeks. It also tends to recover only partially, slowly showing a net dimming over the years.

Tabby’s star has become a favorite among space fans and both professional and citizen astronomers, with a plethora of ideas about what might be causing its behavior. A comet could be on an elliptical orbit or breaking up in front of it. That pesky space dust. It could be stellar indigestion after chowing down on a planet. Some have even hypothesized that alien civilizations might be harvesting the sun’s energy using a Dyson sphere. Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) devoted six nights of observation time to Tabby’s star in the fall of 2016 as part of the Breakthrough Listen project. No radio or laser pulse signals have been detected yet.

The next step is to examine the dimming events using spectra such as infrared light. If an object, natural or otherwise, is blocking Tabby’s light, it will change its color slightly.

The follow on observations after the Kepler project were funded by a $100,000 kickstarter to continuously monitor Tabby’s star. Other organizations monitoring this current Tabby’s star dimming event include the University of Tennessee, Arizona’s MMT Observatory, Mauna Kea’s W.M. Keck Observatory, Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network, and the American Association of Variable Star Observers.. Tabby’s star was originally discovered by volunteers for the Planet Hunters citizen science project, which was implemented to search for planet transits in the Kepler data using the unique pattern finding capabilities of the human eye. This buzz of discussion is what alerted the professional astronomers to it.

[edit]