LocalFluff– yes, we shall see. (I’m no special pleader for this Star or the Tabitha-girl pushing it. There’s an element of showboating involved, that doesn’t sit 100% with me. If the SETI people are spending their own money however, more power to them.)

The paper anyway disproves that there be transits of comets, it just isn’t possible in this quantity over 100 years. The ingress and egress profile of the dimmings already precluding transits of anything. So will the observations of one single telescope of one star out of 160,000 at the same time revolutionize astrophysics? I don’t think so. It will remain unconfirmed and slowly become forgotten.

Frontiers in Artifact SETI:
Waste Heat, Alien Megastructures & Tabbys Star
– Jason Wright (ST 2016)
https://youtu.be/XEDR-G2EDRM …”

Thanks Wayne, as usual you have just the right link at just the right time :-)

That is a very interesting video and answers many questions, as well as raising even more about Tabby’s Star

I think I agree with the speaker, if it’s not an alien megastructure, then most likely it is due to some sort of moving dust or debris in the intervening space between us and the star….

The historical-record paper, using analysis of the glass plate’s, is at:

“KIC 8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165+-0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989”
https://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256

Granted, there are problems associated with photographic plates, but he used a fairly large sample-size, across time, and something is not readily understandable.

As for the Kepler data; I believe it was designed to detect “candidates” primarily & then a variety of methods (optical & radio) would be used to follow up in detail. It did & does have it’s technical limits, hence the Greenbank follow-up, with the alien-theme thrown in for PR of some sort, by someone, for some reason… but there is something going on.

(That’s about all I know…. and it’s the “Robert C. Byrd Greenbank Observatory.” and we had a thread on that a few weeks ago.)

(I’m not big on the “alien megastructure” concept myself, at-all, but there is something going on we don’t understand.)

LocalFluff wrote, “Kepler is the only telescope which has seen it.”

I’ve pointed this out to you before but it obviously didn’t register. You are wrong. The inexplicable and unprecedented changes in the star’s brightness have been observed by multiple observations from multiple telescopes, including the historical record going back almost a hundred years.

Frontiers in Artifact SETI:
Waste Heat, Alien Megastructures & Tabbys Star
– Jason Wright (ST 2016)
https://youtu.be/XEDR-G2EDRM

(Totally off-the-wall; This star is 1,400 light-years away; we have time to build the Invasion Fleet or the Planetary Defense Shield.)

Kepler is the only telescope which has seen it. Half a dozen dips during 4 years were a few to 22% deep and lasted days to weeks. Easily detected with a small ground based telescope. Now one year after the announcement, no one has reported any dips, and I bet that many small telescopes are looking at it constantly (when the season allows). The steady dimming of a few percent over 4 years were also based on data from Kepler. It does complicate the error which must be involved, but it is not an independent confirmation. The dimming over 100 years is based on historic photo plates from many observatories and seems complicated to do with good reliability.

If the dimmings is a natural phenomena, we will have direct observations of new dips any day now. We should already have had. I bet that they’ll never be confirmed.