"How Astronomers Plan to Solve the Mystery of the..." Topic

… "Alien Megastructure Star"

"If you look in enough places, eventually you'll find something profoundly strange. That's been a reliable rule of thumb through the history of science, and last year it proved dramatically true again for astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. While digging through data from NASA's Kepler space telescope, which has been monitoring 150,000 stars for signs of orbiting planets, she realized that one of these things is not like the others. A single star in that set, formally catalogued as KIC 8462852 but informally known as Tabby's Star, flickers in an inexplicable way: unlike the shadows produced by planets, unlike any known type of stellar pulsation, simply unlike anything seen before.

Tabby's Star is so unusual that a few scientists, including Boyajian's colleague Jason Wright, raised the possibility that its flickering is not natural but is due to the presence of an enormous artificial construct. That speculation quickly lent KIC 8462852 another nickname, the "alien megastructure star," and prompted a flood of breathless news stories; it even got a shout out on Saturday Night Live. Boyajian's subsequent TED lecture drew even more attention to her star. [Update: A week after I posted this interview, Tabby's Star star got weirder still: A new study shows that it has been inexplicably getting dimmer over the past three years.]…"
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