Did Tabby’s star going through periodic and deep dimmings because of dust and debris clouds that pass edbetween it and the mirror of the Kepler Space Telescope? That was an earlier explanation for the highly unusual behavior of the star, but new research makes that answer less likely. Artist drawing by NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle
Substantial, sun-like stars are not supposed to dim. They start with gravity and pressure induced nuclear reactions, and then they burn brighter and brighter until they either explode (go supernova) or burn all their fuel and become small, enormously dense, and not very bright “white dwarfs.”
Of course, the transit technique of searching for exoplanets looks precisely for dimmings — of stars caused by the passage of an exoplanet. But those are tiny reductions in the star’s brightness and short-lived. So if a star is dimming significantly over a much longer period of time, something unusual is going on.
And that is apparently exactly what is happening with the current poster child for mysterious stars — KIC 8462852 or “Tabby’s star,” named after the Yale University postdoc who, with the help of citizen scientists, discovered it, Tabetha Boyajian.
First written up last fall, the big news was data from the Kepler Space Telescope showed that the star had experienced two major and dissimilar dips in brightness — a highly unusual and perplexing phenomenon. The dips appeared much too large to represent the passage of an exoplanet, so explanations tended towards the baroque — a swarm of comets, a vast dust cloud, even an alien megastructure (proposed as a last possible explanation.) The observation was first identified by citizen planet hunters working with Boyajian, making it an even more compelling finding.
Now the mystery has grown stranger still. A paper made public last week based on a different kind of Kepler imaging (full-frame imaging) found not two but one enormous dip in the light curve, as well as a surprising and significant dimming the of star over the four year observing period of the space telescope. The paper has been submitted for publication in American Astronomical Society journals.
Benjamin Montet of Caltech and Joshua Simon of the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, analyzed the full-field images taken by Kepler every three months (rather than the hourly images studied by Boyajian et al,) and concluded that something strange was indeed going on.
Their conclusion: “No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.”… Read more
