“The dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star and we still have no idea what it is!” said German astronomer Michael Hippke this past May. Even if aliens are not involved, Tabby’s star remains “the most mysterious star in the universe” as Yale astronomer Tabetha Boyajian described KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby’s star.

Now, new research led by Huan Meng, an astronomer at the University of Arizona concludes that a microscopic dust ring originating from circumstellar material found in the star system is causing the dimming and brightening exhibited by KIC 8462852. “It cannot be anything from the interstellar medium,” says Meng — meaning the object(s) at the focus of this investigation is definitely within the planetary system of Tabby’s star.

“What we do not know, is what caused this phenomenon,” says Meng, lead author of of the new observations in an interview with Inverse.com detailing the results made with a pair of space telescopes “eliminates the possibility of an alien megastructure” orbiting KIC 8462852. Meng and his team have submitted their paper to Astrophysical Journal, where it has already gone through peer review and been accepted for publication.

In this latest study, Meng and his colleagues including Boyajin collected observational data from October 2015 to March 2017 of KIC 8462852 using two more NASA space telescopes: Swift, which is able to make X-ray and ultraviolet (UV) light measurements; and Spitzer, which can measure objects in infrared (IR). These observations essentially add two more dimensions to the Kepler data, which is monochromatic.

“We found that from UV, throughout the visible spectrum, to IR, the star is dimming at every wavelength we monitored,” says Meng. That’s good confirmation that the initial Kepler data was accurate.

But more importantly according to Inverse, Meng and his team found that the dimming rates between UV and IR differed significantly. The distinction suggested, “micro-sized dust screens” are the culprit behind the irregular dimming observations. “Only microscopic fine-dust screens are able to scatter the starlight” in the way characterized by measurements, says Meng.

Meng emphasizes, as scientists must, “this is not a firm conclusion that this must be a dust ring around the star. It is [however] consistent with that hypothesis.”

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This is at odds with the fact that the IR signature of a dust ring is NOT seen….

A HUGE ringed planet with accompanying Trojan asteroids… if correct there should be some smaller irregular dips in the first quarter of 2021, and a Huge dip in 2023…

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a26575/something-weird-is-happening-to-the-alien-megastructure-star/

As far as weird stars go, few are as strange as KIC 8462852, nicknamed Tabby’s star. Tabby’s star randomly dims and brightens for apparently no reason, which led some astronomers in 2015 to hypothesize that some sort of ‘alien megastructure’ was orbiting the star, occasionally blocking the light. Other scientists proposed a large asteroid field or a swarm of comets instead, but we still don’t really know what’s going on.

All of that might be about to change. Early this morning, astronomers detected one of those characteristic dips that are unique to Tabby’s star. All of the other dips that we know of are from historical observations, but this one is happening right now, which gives astronomers a chance to really figure out what’s happening.

It is a revision of the one I posted just below…

Edit-Actually there isnt much new in this revision, just a little more on the statistics of the behavior of other stars. And section 5.3 is new…

Astronomers have looked for evidence for such a circumstellar disk here and have been able to rule that out…

The sub-millimeter observations of Thompson
et al. (2016) place a limit of 7.7 M⊕ of material within
200 AU of KIC 8462852, ruling out a direct analogue of
these other systems

I don’t recall how that particular system was eventually described, but it does show you what a zoo of potential strangeness can occur out there. But what I really find exciting about this system is the low infrared components. You would expect a system like this would have a lot of dust involved.

One model for the Epsilon Aurigae system:

http://www.astronomynow.com/news/n1001/05aurigae/EA3.jpg

We examine whether the rapid decline could be caused by a cloud of transiting circumstellar material, finding while such a cloud could evade detection in sub-mm observations, the transit ingress and duration cannot be explained by a simple cloud model. Moreover, this model cannot account for the observed longer-term dimming. No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.