KIC 8462852 Alien Megastructure Star Update 01/25/2017

This is another installment in my continuing coverage of KIC 8462852 or Boyajian's star for January 25, 2017. Several new developments have come out that are offering fresh takes on just what's causing the mysterious dips in brightness observed to be occurring at this bizarre star. One involves a new natural explanation to consider and the other expands on a specific type of alien activity that could explain a very unique and odd feature contained within the Kepler light curve.

Observations of the star continue with no new dimming events yet detected. This is unfortunate as actually capturing a dimming event and studying it in more detail than Kepler could is key to solving the mystery, or would at least clear a lot of things up, see my previous videos on this subject for information on that. But it may not be too much longer before the next dimming event if one prediction holds true. More on that in a minute.

The first development came in the form of a paper by Brian Metzger and his colleagues at Colombia University in New York. This theory is noteworthy because their paper manages to merge two really odd aspects of the phenomenon that is happening at KIC 8462852, link to the paper in the description below. Boyajian's star isn't just dimming, it's doing it in two different ways and that's been difficult to reconcile with the previous natural explanations that have been offered.

On the one hand, we have the large, deep dips that the Kepler spacecraft observed that drew scientist's attention in the first place. But on the other, we have an apparent trend of the star dimming over all over the course of a century based on a study of photographic plates and confirmed by another study of the Kepler data. So we have a star that dims on both long-term and short-term timescales. Very mysterious indeed, and Occam's razor leads us to conclude that the two phenomena are almost certainly linked and that places a lot of constraints on just what could be causing it.

But Metzger and his team offer an answer that has a bit more plausibility than most of the natural theories so far put forth. They offer that Boyajian's star has recently torn apart and eaten a planet. This would create a situation where the star would brighten for a short period of time and then comparatively quickly calm back down fitting the long-term dimming trend observed with the star. It would simply be a star recovering after recently having had a burst of energy just after dinner.

But there would also likely be debris leftover after such an event that would block starlight more or less like what we would see in the deep dips in the Kepler light curve. This could be disassociated material from the torn apart planet itself or its moons and if it were in the right kind of highly elliptical orbit it would solve a further mystery involving the lack of infrared radiation which should be present from any small particle dusty material orbiting the star the bulk of which the Columbia team point out could have been blown far out into space by solar radiation where it's now simply too cool to see in IR.

Other than one feature, the day 792 dip which is still a bit of a head-scratcher, the Kepler light curve does look much like a young star system surrounded by dust and gas looks. The trouble is, KIC 8462852 does not appear to be a young star and shouldn't have this sort of debris disc around it any longer.

That's what makes this particular theory attractive because it allows a star like Boyajian's star which appears to be old to have a debris disc, dim and then brighten again overall, and also undergo brief, deep dimming events yet show no infrared heat radiating off the material.

But, as with all theories involving KIC 8462852, there's a problem. And it's a big one. This would be a very short-term event, the planet would have fallen into Boyajian's star between 200 and 10,000 years previous to the dips, remember we're seeing KIC 8462852 as it was over 1200 years ago as that's how long its light takes reach us.

This is a conspicuously short period in geologic time scales. And while such events are bound to happen, gravity is gravity and it's a safe bet that planets do indeed fall into stars, it should be statistically very hard to catch such a thing in the act because it happens very quickly as far as geologic time is concerned. You'd just have to be looking at just the right moment to see the aftermath of a star eating a planet making this an exceedingly rare event. You have better odds of winning the lottery than catching something like this as it was occurring.

One thing we don't really know is how often planets fall into stars, so it's possible that this is a more common event than we currently think, in which case we'll have to revise our thinking on the frequency of these sorts of events and look for more examples to corroborate it. As Dr. Jason Wright points out on his blog, link in the description below, most stars in KIC 8462852's class would need to be regularly eating planets and they'd also have to do it by going into highly eccentric orbits and you'd need a somewhat  implausible amount of planetary material in the universe to fit the bill. Once again, Boyajian's star throws us a curve ball and only time and more study will clear that up.

But even if the star ate a planet, then the mysterious day 792 dip from the Kepler data is  going to take a bit more explaining than the other features in the Kepler light curve. It really is odd and that leads us to the second development.

This one stems from something I covered in my previous update in December and deals directly with the day 792 dip and the potential activity of an alien civilization if this is in fact what we're seeing, which is still on the table, though I caution remains highly unlikely, partially because of the same problem that the planet eating theory suffers from; you'd have to just be really lucky and happen to catch the aliens in the act which is highly unlikely unless aliens are far more common than the Fermi paradox would suggest. But people do win the lottery, so it's possible.

As I covered in my previous update, Dr. Eduard Heindl has advanced a hypothesis that the activity we're seeing at Boyajian's star could be due to stellar lifting, a hypothetical method that advanced civilizations might employ to harvest materials from their star.

In his blog, link in the description below, he offers models on the different dips observed by Kepler especially the odd day 792 dip that suggest that the behavior of Boyajian's star could be indicative of an advanced alien species using a beam to lift material from their star. But not only that, he goes further to suggest that it would be possible to calculate the rotational period of that beam. If this is the case, then the next dip should begin on or around February 21st of 2017.

While I am always very cautious when I talk about the potential for alien activity at KIC 8462852, I personally would bet money that what we're seeing is a natural phenomenon, I would be remiss if I didn't admit that this story would change very dramatically and become even more interesting if that predicted dip occurs on schedule. We shall see.