'Alien Megastructure' Star Is at It Again with the Strange Dimming [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Calla Cofield, Space.com Staff Writer | May 19, 2017 04:15pm ET


The perplexing cosmic object known as "Boyajian's star" is once again exhibiting a mysterious pattern of dimming and brightening that scientists have tried to explain with hypotheses ranging from swarms of comets to alien megastructures.

Today (May 19), an urgent call went out to scientists around the world to turn as many telescopes as possible toward the star, to try and crack the mystery of its behavior.

"At about 4 a.m. this morning I got a phone call … that Fairborn [Observatory] in Arizona had confirmed that the star was 3 percent dimmer than it normally is," Jason Wright, an associate professor of astronomy at Pennsylvania State University, who is managing a study of Boyajian's star, said during a live webcast today at 2 p.m. EDT (1800 GMT). "That is enough that we are absolutely confident that this is no statistical fluke. We've now got it confirmed at multiple observatories, I think."

. . .

Star KIC 8462852, or Boyajian's star (also nicknamed "Tabby's star," for astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who led the team that first detected the star's fluctuations), has demonstrated an irregular cycle of growing dimmer and then returning to its previous brightness. These changes were first spotted in September 2015 using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, which was built to observe these kinds of dips in a star's brightness, because they can be caused by a planet moving in front of the star as seen from Earth.

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