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Kepler finds a star no one can explain

Observations using Kepler have uncovered a star whose light fluctuations can only be explained in two ways.

First,

If another star had passed through the unusual star’s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern. But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.

Second? Maybe the star’s light is being blocked by a swarm of megastructures built by an alien civilization. They intend to look for radio emissions from the star in wavelengths associated with technology to see if this theory has any possibility.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

3 comments

  • ted

    Dyson Sphere?

  • Steve

    More like a Ringworld of some sort or maybe a Dyson Swarm. A sphere would block all light at all times and we would never even know there was a star there……

  • Matt in AZ

    Perhaps there are drawbacks to having fully-closed Dyson sphere that captures everything the star puts out, and a sphere with patterned holes or gaps would be more practical. “Dyson Whiffle”? If the openings are regularly spaced, it could show up in the data. Assuming anything remotely like this is actually there, of course.

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