{"id":11279,"date":"2015-10-15T00:03:52","date_gmt":"2015-10-15T04:03:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/?p=11279"},"modified":"2015-10-15T00:03:52","modified_gmt":"2015-10-15T04:03:52","slug":"the-most-mysterious-star-in-our-galaxy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2015\/10\/15\/the-most-mysterious-star-in-our-galaxy\/","title":{"rendered":"The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In the Northern hemisphere\u2019s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations\u2014Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word \u201clyric.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d never seen anything like this star,\u201d says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. \u201cIt was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.<\/p>\n

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler\u2019s science team couldn\u2019t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler\u2019s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked \u201ccitizen scientists\u201d to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.<\/p>\n

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as \u201cinteresting\u201d and \u201cbizarre.\u201d The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But this unusual star isn\u2019t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn\u2019t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.<\/p>\n

It appears to be mature.<\/p>\n

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.
\nBoyajian, the Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing the star\u2019s 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\u2014instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.<\/p>\n

The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star\u2019s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.<\/p>\n

And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn\u2019t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.<\/p>\n

When I spoke to Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews \u201cnatural\u201d scenarios. \u201cBut,\u201d she said, there were \u201cother scenarios\u201d she was considering.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s light pattern is consistent with a \u201cswarm of megastructures,\u201d perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,\u201d Wright told me. \u201cAliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they\u2019ll 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\u2019s network of radio stations.<\/p>\n

Source: The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy – The Atlantic<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the Northern hemisphere\u2019s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations\u2014Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word \u201clyric.\u201d 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. \u201cWe\u2019d never seen anything like this star,\u201d says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. \u201cIt was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.\u201d 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\u2019d 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\u2019s science team couldn\u2019t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[159,222,992],"class_list":["post-11279","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-space","tag-aliens","tag-astronomy","tag-kepler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11279","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11279"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11279\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11279"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11279"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.megalextoria.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11279"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}