Comet halo theory for flickering 'alien megastructure' star fails It's still not an alien megastructure, but the strangely-dimming sun known as Tabby's Star isn't being occasionally occluded by comets. KIC 8462852, to use its formal designation, gave UFO-spotters a veritable hypegasm last year, because the odd fluctuations in its brightness were hard to explain. When Penn State University …
a Jupiter-like world in a decaying orbit becomes hot enough a hundred years ago to start losing gas rapidly, hence the overall long term dimming since then.
As the gas forms into clouds orbiting the sun they, plus what's left of the unfortunate planet, cause the "blinking" effect we see now.
Possible? Unlikely? Bueller?
Given that we're looking "edge-on" for this system, anything not a gas would be applicable. Which is, in fact, quite a lot without having to resort to science fantasy. Could be as simple as an asteroid belt with density variation caused by orbital bodies we can't see/detect.
F-type means the star is hotter than our sun, and as such has a shorter lifetime. Which also implies it's a tad younger, and could well be in the formative stage when it comes to the rest of the Bits Around It™.
Besides that.. If a species has the intelligence and technology of building something on that scale, you'd expect them to choose a location that's much more likely to be stable and well-behaved, such as a smallish G-type, or lower. If you're essentially building for a good part of eternity, using up the resources that can only be supplied by the sum total of several other solar systems ( and all that implies) , you really would aim for something powering it that stays stable for a good number of billions of years. Which an F-type most certainly isn't.
The idea that they would reject an F type star due to its short lifetime seems pretty unlikely to me. You have to take a longer term view than humanity to build a structure around a star, but you don't need to think in terms of billions of years to do it!
Also, isn't the most likely place to build it around your OWN star? After all, Earth is where we keep most of our stuff. Home is where you always build your first megastructure. Later if you go looking for new sites I'd argue you'd build around very young shorter-lived hot stars - no life to worry about disrupting, and the hotter the better in terms of how much energy it provides you to build your fleets of berzerker robots, computers to answer the ultimate question or whatever it is super-advanced civilizations do with their free time.
It'd also be an impressive example of fast-track engineering for anyone to encircle a star in just 100 years.
The thing about building a star-encircling megastructure, is that it requires a civilisation capable of building a star-encircling megastructure. That's already so far beyond our capabilities or understanding that estimating or presuming feasible time-scales seems a pretty futile exercise.
"The thing about building a star-encircling megastructure, is that it requires a civilisation capable of building a star-encircling megastructure."
So, what you're saying is that until you've tried to build a star-encircling megastructure, you won't know if you can build a star-encircling megastructure?
They would be building it in an automated fashion, and probably the first step would be having the machines that do the asteroid mining/processing and those that do the construction self-replicate. There would be some optimal amount of time for that self replication to proceed to minimize the total construction time, which would imply that once things got going on the construction of the actual Dyson ring/sphere it would move very quickly.
It is too bad that IR ruled out the megastructures. Though there's something about that explanation that bothers me. Something appears to be blocking the light from the star. Anything that does so, is absorbing a lot of energy that must be radiated as IR. The only way it doesn't is if it is so thick the energy hasn't reached the 'outside' yet or if it is using physics we don't yet understand.
What can block such a large percentage of light from a star but not radiate IR? It would have to be a perfectly reflective mirror...not sure if physics says such a thing is impossible or not, or what the purpose would be for building one.
It's a paperclip-making AI gone on the rampage.
Many wonderful treasures are saved in the Harvard plates, but the reality is that the current generation of astronomers are mostly unaware of their existence. J. Grindlay has started and lead the work to completely digitize all ≈500,000 plates (Grindlay et al. 2012; Tang et al. 2013). His program is called Digital Access to a Sky Century @ Harvard (DASCH) . The products are top-quality digitization for each plate (plus the envelope, plate markings, and logbook entry), plus fully-calibrated magnitudes for each stellar image on the plate. Currently, DASCH has completed only ≈15% of the Harvard archives, and this includes all the plates covering the original Cygnus/Lyra Kepler field.
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