Is the mystery of Tabby's star solved? (7 photos). Scientists have found an explanation for the strange behavior of the tabby star What's going on with the tabby star

A new theory claims that KIC 8462852, also known as "Tabby's Star" or the "Giant Alien Star," periodically disappears from the sky not because of an object blocking our view, but because of weakening radiation.

The brightness of these celestial bodies changes gradually from their birth to the end of their lives, but KIC 8462852 is a middle-aged F-type star slightly larger than the Sun. Such objects have not previously been seen to change their emission levels over a short period of time. It was assumed that when it was observed through the Kepler space telescope, something prevented it from being seen properly. Theories varied: giant UFOs or comets passing through gas clouds...

And all these opinions had the right to life, taking into account the fact that the brightness of the star decreased for a long time. However, later scientists suggested that the matter could be due to internal changes in KIC 8462852, and provided evidence in favor of this.

UFO or exponential law in action?

An article in Physical Review Letters describes how Tabby's large, bright star is surrounded by several smaller stars. And this is the case when the exponential law applies, which states that there is a relationship between the frequency of occurrence of events and their significance.

Small events happen more often than big ones. Where this law works, the decrease in frequency will be constant in relation to the increase in size. The authors of the article claim that KIC 8462852 follows the same rule as snow that begins to melt shortly before an avalanche occurs.

All of these phenomena, known as “avalanche statistics,” have been observed in physical systems that are close to entering a phase where something important will happen.

The publication's lead author, Mohammed Sheikh, believes that the existence of this law can help astronomers solve the mystery of Tabby's star. “This gives us the ability to interpret events and check for dependencies from a different perspective,” he says.

Enhanced Surveillance

In the future, scientists plan to use several telescopes to observe the star. Perhaps this will help clarify the reasons for such a long eclipse of KIC 8462852: was it due to the objects blocking it, or is it just a decrease in the brightness of light radiation as a result of fulfilling the conditions of the law?

Since such strange behavior has not been observed in F-type stars before, the study of KIC 8462852 could be a breakthrough in astronomy and change our understanding of how celestial bodies behave.

Tabby's Star (KIC 8462852) captured the world's attention back in September 2015 when it was discovered to be experiencing a mysterious drop in brightness. On May 18, 2017, new failures were announced, prompting observatories around the world to point their telescopes at Tubby.

As before, this mysterious behavior fueled speculation about its causes. Previously, ideas ranged from comet swarms and planet takeovers to alien megastructures. But recent research describes new reasons. The first is the presence of Trojan asteroids and a massive planet with rings in the KIC 8462852 system, the second is a ring system in the outer Solar System.

Huge planet with rings and Trojan asteroids

The first study presented in , conducted by a team of scientists from Spain. The work is based on data from the Kepler telescope, which recorded dips in the star's brightness of up to 20 percent in 2015, as well as non-periodic eclipse repetitions observed later. The team created a model of the system that showed that a ringed object and Trojan asteroids sharing the same orbit could explain the star's mysterious behavior.

The Tabby star system as conceived by Spanish scientists. Credit: F. Ballesteros et al.

This explanation not only offers a completely natural scenario for what could lead to an eclipse of a star, but also points to something that could confirm their theory. “Whereas most other scientists' scenarios call for the presence of never-before-directly observed astronomical objects in the system, from a swarm of comets to a Dyson sphere, our model requires the presence of relatively familiar things, namely a large planet with orbital rings and a cloud of Trojan asteroids. Moreover, our work allows us to make a certain prediction: the Trojan cloud should cause a new period of dips in the light curve around 2021,” said Fernando Ballesteros, lead author of the study from the University of Valencia (Spain).

Jason Wright from Pennsylvania State University (USA), who proposed the theory of alien megastructures, commented on the work of Spanish scientists. He notes that the theory has strengths, but does not take into account some observations.

According to him, the dips in brightness are quite significant, which cannot be easily explained by natural phenomena. The study also does not address the secular decline of Tabby's star. But perhaps most important, according to Wright, is the mass it would take to create an eclipse.

“They need a lot of asteroids. The quantity they offer is enormous: more than the mass of Jupiter! It is not clear to me how such a swarm can be co-orbital with a planet and remain stable. Besides, how do you keep matter of such enormous mass from coalescing into a planet? And where can I get so many stones?!” – Jason Wright comments.

Ring around the solar system

The second article is also presented in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. In it, Professor Jonathan Katz from the University of Washington (USA), argues that the failures of Tabby's star may be caused by objects in the solar system itself, in particular, the ring structure that is located between the Kepler telescope and KIC 8462852.

Based on the interval between dips, as well as the telescope's orbit, Jonathan Katz calculated how far away this hypothetical ring would be, and estimated its size and particle distribution. As he wrote in his paper, an object 600 meters in size will be able to briefly block all the light coming from Tabby's star.

“The occurrence of deep holes separated by approximately two years of Kepler observations hints that this phenomenon may be local rather than circumstellar. This is suggestive, but not statistically convincing, since the interval differs from Keplerian years by a few percent. However, the difficulty of developing a convincing circumstellar model justifies possible explanations using rings from the solar system,” said Jonathan Katz.

Another interesting aspect of the study is the fact that it also makes predictions about future eclipses. The hypothesis shows that future dips in brightness could be observed from Earth at intervals of just one year. But according to Wright, who also commented on this article, it looks like a mathematical miscalculation.

“Some of the math doesn't seem right to me. Jonathan Katz predicts that the holes will be visible from Earth every 365.25 Earth days, but he ignores the orbital motion of the object itself. Besides, such a ring cannot explain all the failures, and how could it have arisen in the first place?” – Jason Wright comments.

We may never know what is behind the strange behavior of KIC 8462852. But we want to believe that the next generation of telescopes will help us figure it out, and we will be able to truly explore this mysterious Tabby star.

The star KIC 8462852, discovered by astronomer Tabota "Tubby" Boyajian, attracted the attention of scientists and journalists around the world due to unusual changes in brightness, which the biggest enthusiasts attributed to the construction of a Dyson sphere around the star. Several scientific papers, one after another, refute the assumptions made in previous works. Another work refuting old assumptions and introducing new questions was published by two teams of astrophysicists.

Tabby's Star is located 1,480 light years from Earth. It was found as part of a project to search for exoplanets with the Kepler telescope using the transit method. Passing between us and the star, the planets cause a symmetrical decline and subsequent increase in brightness. Last year, due to the fact that the fluctuations in its brightness were uncharacteristic and asymmetrical.

The dips in brightness, which occurred over a period of 100 days, looked as if the star was being obscured by a large swarm of irregularly shaped objects. Scientists from Pennsylvania State University even suggested that in the orbit of the star, the construction of a Dyson sphere is taking place - a mega-object that collects all the energy of the star for subsequent processing.

To test this idea, radio telescopes of the SETI project scanned the surroundings of the star, but... In addition, such a megastructure should have radiated well in the infrared range, which was also not discovered.

Another team of scientists suggested that there are stars around. But astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University studied scans of historical images of this area of ​​the sky taken from 1890 to 1989. It turned out that during this time the brightness of the star decreased by 20%, and in addition, he calculated that the comet hypothesis does not correspond to observations.

The serious decrease in the brightness of the star was difficult to explain by anything other than the gradual appearance of a megastructure in its orbit. But the use of photographs from the “Digital Access to a Sky Century” archive prompted the idea of ​​a student from Vanderbilt University that the resulting calculated change in the brightness of the star was caused not by real processes occurring with the star, but by an error in measurements and the use of photographs from different telescopes for the archive.

A similar idea occurred to another astronomer working at Lehigh University. Scientists decided to join forces and study materials from the astrophotography archive. It turned out that many of the stars captured in the archive photos experienced a drop in brightness in the 1960s, suggesting that these changes were actually caused by changes in the equipment used for the photographs.

True, even without this, the star raises too many unanswered questions. In 2009, there was a dip in the star's brightness that lasted a week. It differed from the passage of planets across the disk of a star in that it was asymmetrical. Then the light remained constant for two years, after which a drop of as much as 15% occurred for a week.

In 2013, the light from the star generally began to blink irregularly and in a complex pattern, and this phenomenon lasted for 100 days. At some moments, the brightness of the star dropped by 20%. According to Tabota, such a dimming would require an object 1,000 times the size of Earth to pass between us and the star. There is no other similar data for any of the stars scanned by Kepler.

None of the hypotheses proposed by scientists (changes in the brightness of the star itself, the collision of planets, clouds of dust, the disintegration of a huge comet, the influence of the star’s dwarf companion on its behavior) completely fit into the observations. It is clear that the star is being obscured by something – but what exactly, scientists cannot yet explain.

Recently, the distant star KIC 8462852, or Tabby, has caught the attention of astronomers. The fact is that the Kepler telescope, which observed it from 2009 to 2013, discovered that the star flickers regularly, and this process is not entirely typical... This led some experts to believe that the flickering is of artificial origin.

Scientists have found the Death Star

Mysterious blackouts

The mentioned double star KIC 8462852, located in the constellation Cygnus, 1480 light years from the Sun, received its “unofficial” name in honor of Tabetha Boyajian, an employee of Yale University, who first studied its properties. Last September, volunteers of Planet Hunters (a crowdsourcing project to search for ) noticed that the star’s light was regularly dimming.

This usually indicates the passage of an exoplanet in front of the disk of the star. It is known that the largest planets can block up to one percent of the radiation of stars, but in the case of Tabby, she lost up to 20 percent of her brightness during periods of darkening! In addition, if it’s a planet, then the intervals between darkenings should be regular, but meanwhile, they are sporadic: pauses in changes in glow can range from five to 80 days.

Comets or Dyson sphere?

Boyajian and her colleagues tried to find the cause of this “anomaly.” First, they carefully examined the Kepler data, looking for possible errors and errors. But the information was not distorted.

After considering possible scenarios, Boyajian concluded that the type of star and its spectral analysis exclude changes in luminosity due to internal processes. The dimming may come from dust from a cometary cloud surrounding the star. At the same time, the researcher herself admits that this explanation looks a little far-fetched: being surrounded by a swarm of comets is typical for young stars whose planetary system is at the stage of formation. But KIC 8462852 is not such a star, so the swarm may include both comets and asteroids pulled into the star’s orbit by a gravitational disturbance caused by the passage of another star several millennia ago.

In addition, if we accept the “comet” hypothesis as true, then comets should have a diameter of 200 kilometers or more. "It's difficult to find comets that are large enough to block that much starlight," Boyajian said.

The news of the “anomalous” star excited the astrophysical community. Jason Wright from the University of Pennsylvania even suggested that Tubby may be surrounded by some kind of megastructures created by. For example, this could be an astro-engineered object called a Dyson sphere, built from material from planets in the local system for the purpose of collecting energy emitted by the star.

Wright is echoed by the director of the Research Center for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations at the University of California, Andrew Simion: “Perhaps we are dealing with an extremely advanced civilization that has built a large network of storage devices to accumulate huge reserves of energy received from the star. Perhaps the irregularity of the light curve indicates that "that artificially created objects revolve around the star."

If you look at things realistically...

In search of the truth, Bradley Schaefer from Louisiana State University turned to old photographic plates from the Harvard College Observatory. It turned out that from 1890 to 1989, Tabby was photographed more than 1,200 times. It turned out that the star flickers at short intervals, and over the past century it has gradually lost its brightness.

Although surrounding the star with a swarm of comets certainly looks like a more plausible version than the activity of an alien civilization, many questions arise here.

“They must have more mass than we have in the entire Kuiper belt,” comments Massimo Marengo from Iowa State University. “This could be concluded if we assume that the same family of comets passes in front of the star over and over again. But with the secular trend of dimming, this family of comets should get larger each time they pass by a star. It's a tough call."

As for the alien hypothesis, astronomer Phil Platt calculated that to reduce the star’s brightness by 20 percent, the aliens would need to build at least 750 billion square kilometers of energy panels, which is one and a half thousand times the area of ​​the Earth.

On October 19 last year, the SETI Institute began using the Allen Telescope Array to observe the radio emission of KIC 8462852, trying to detect signals of artificial origin that could indicate the presence of an intelligent civilization near the star. However, none were found.