They believe that “behavior” of the stars has no scientific explanation.
Scientists said that the star KIC 8462852 not only mysteriously fades with time, but occasionally inexplicably increases its brightness, which casts doubt on almost all “natural” explanation of its flashing.
“Until now we thought that the brightness of the stars varies only in one direction – in other words, we thought it only dims. The fact that she really sometimes becomes more striking after periods of tarnishing, not compatible with most of current hypotheses,” said Joshua Simon from the Carnegie institution for science in Pasadena.
In the study, researchers analyzed the archives of the two observatories: project ASASSN, an automated search of supernovae, and review of the ASAS, in which scientists continuously monitor all of the night sky for more than 10 years.
Access to these two archives has allowed scientists to solve two problems at once – to understand how the brightness of KIC 8462852 has varied in the longer term once “Kepler” is out of order and started to look at other parts of the sky, and learn how “star Tabby” looked like before 2009, when it launched a space telescope.
These observations pointed to two interesting things. First, the brightness of the “star alien” continues to fall at the current time, and it dropped by about 1.5%, a value unthinkable by the standards of astronomy, from February 2015.
In addition, over the past 11 years, KIC 8462852 experienced two very strange period, when its brightness is not decreased, but increased for a long time. It puts an end to all the “asteroid” and “planetary” theories about it tarnishing, and imposes severe restrictions on other, more exotic scenarios such as the collision of the moons or planets with a star or existence in its orbit a giant ring of dust with a width of nearly a billion kilometers.
What caused the increase in brightness of the “stars Tabby”, scientists do not yet know – it is necessary to conduct observations of KIC 8462852 in different parts of its spectrum and to understand, whether it becomes more prominent in all of them or only in some areas of visible or infrared radiation.
In October 2015, astronomers from Yale University have stated that the luminosity of the star has twice fallen by a quarter over the past seven years. According to researchers, this could indicate the existence around the star Dyson sphere created by the civilization of aliens. To do this, astronomers assumed that the stars can fly a swarm of comets, but subsequent observations have shown that over the last 100 years its brightness fell by 0.16 magnitudes that questioned this theory.
Later, scientists studied the brightness change of the star since December 2009, when it launched the telescope “Kepler”, in may 2013. The researchers showed that the brightness of the “star alien” has declined to 0.3% per year, and for the first thousand days of work “Kepler” she fell 0.9%. Then she was falling even faster, and just six months after that, she fell 2%. Then the rate of decline has decreased, and at the moment it fell 3%.
Scientists have also measured the fluctuations in the brightness of other stars, which confirmed the assumption that KIC 8462852 is a unique star, whose behavior cannot be explained using existing models.
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