Fifty years ago — November 28, 1967 — a strange signal from the heavens was detected by radio astronomers in Cambridge, England. It was essentially a pulsing beep-beep-beep, the beeps being a little more than a second apart. Was this a signal from an alien civilization, a calling card from afar? The researchers jokingly called the regular signal “LGM-1,” for Little Green Men. Trouble was, the signal was just too regular, devoid of information. And thus was born our knowledge of “pulsars,” rapidly rotating neutron stars. As they spin, these extremely small and dense stars appear to flash energetic radio waves, much as a lighthouse seems to blink at regular intervals even thought its light is uniform. Sorry, no aliens.
Fast forward to the 2014 discovery, by amateurs scouring data from the Kepler orbiting telescope, of what Scientific American touts as “the galaxy’s strangest star.” (I think our sun would be a stronger contender for that title, given how it made possible the evolution of intelligent life.) KIC 8462852, aka Tabitha Boyajian’s star, is pretty weird. “Tabby” Boyajian is a researcher at Yale and a member of the “Planet Hunters” amateur network which first noted the odd star. She subsequently wrote a paper about it subtitled “Where’s the Flux?” (as in WTF?)
By most measures, it’s a run-of-the-mill middle-aged “F-type” star some 1,300 light years distant in the constellation Cygnus, not too dissimilar from the sun. Such stars are about as stable as they come, with the same energy output — measured by their “light output curves” — year in, year out. Not Tabby’s star, though, which is odd in two ways. One, it’s getting dimmer, probably 15 percent dimmer over the past century, as measured from archival photographs, and definitely 3 percent dimmer over the four-year 2009-2013 Kepler mission. Two (really odd!), its light output suddenly and irregularly plummets briefly by up to 20 percent, as it last did about four weeks ago. Hundreds of amateur and professional star-gazers around the world observed this most recent event.
What’s going on? Astronomers have come up with myriad scenarios, including swarms of comets, dust clouds, a planet falling into the star and a black hole obscuring starlight. Nothing seems to fit the data, though, and hence the connection to LGM-1. Perhaps (drum roll) we’re looking at evidence of an alien civilization which has built artificial megastructures that orbit irregularly around their star, thus giving rise to the observed odd light curve. Such structures were proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson over 50 years ago, although author Olaf Stapleton, in his awesomely inventive 1937 novel Star Maker, may have been the first to moot the idea.
Oh, I wish. Not likely, though. If the aliens really were harnessing gobs of energy from their star, that energy would eventually (according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics) leak away as infrared radiation. Which we could detect. But, sad to relate, nothing in the spectrum of Tabby’s star looks like such an IR signature.
So there’s probably a mundane explanation, just that we haven’t figured out what it is. Which, of course, is what drives science and scientists: the quest to understand.
Barry Evans (barryevans9@yahoo.com) read Star Maker as a kid. He hasn’t been the same since.
This article appears in Three Strikes.
Something is blocking considerable light from Tabby’s star. By the Second Law of Thermodynamics, it’s got to radiate, but at first look, it does not. At least it is 60 deg K or colder.
There are two ways this could happen, the light blocking stuff is way out from the star where the re-radiation temperature is low, or the radiation is being directed away from our line of sight. There are power satellite designs that radiate waste heat directionally away from the local ecliptic, but one 22 % of the area of the photosphere of Tabby’s star is hard to imagine.
Yeah, the energy has to go somewhere…maybe that 22% is only hard to imagine for a generation that’s barely got off its home planet?
Why do you wish to find extraterrestrial life? What’s in it for humanity?
Robert Lockett asked, “What’s in it for humanity?”
We journey into an uncharted future. Technological singularity, AI, nanotechnology and the like. It would be nice to know if we can survive these changes. An example of high-tech ET life around a remote star would indicate the future is survivable. So far, we don’t know.
Of course, we could be the first in our corner of the universe (light cone) in which case we travel into the future with no guidance.
Thanks Keith. I don’t not share the belief that our future is uncharted. The hard cold facts tell me that our future is death, the heat death of the universe if nothing else. The only solution would be to get outside of the constraints of this universe. Constraints such as time.
That raises an interesting logical parallel, though as a theist it is an easy line of reasoning for me to follow. The simple logic does not offend me. That does not seem the case with many others. They seem hell bent (if you’ll pardon the expression) on finding some other way. But logic is our only light according to the apostle John. Wish more people grasped that shocking fact.
I don’t think it mundane that you speak of survival. And I don’t think you have in your mind the picture of surviving for a millennia or two. I suspect that without realizing it, you picture a perpetual survival albeit punctuated by great threats of our ultimate end along the way. We are concerned that our own infantile understanding might kill us. Playing God is like that, dangerous.
If that is so, you are REALLY talking about eternal life. What an odd desire given the facts of nature as revealed objectively BY nature. Nature seems to indicate we must look elsewhere for such hope. And she does so with the cold facts of the empirical application of the laws of logic that we call science. It is an odd desire indeed unless it is one of the byproducts of our having been created in God’s image or something along such lines. The same logic that makes science possible does not refute such hope. We take such desires for granted but rarely stop to allow the same logic we do science with to guide our questions about those desires. We don’t even ASK such questions.
IF God is there (not in the primitive Greek or Babylonian sense of another creature INSIDE this universe mistaken for forces or celestial bodies OF nature, but the monotheistic sense of an uncreated God OUTSIDE this universe along the lines of eternal multiverse theory), then he transcends time as an ETERNAL being. He can see the future the same as the past. And in that case our future is not uncharted.
I am not saying we are determined because God knows what we will do BEFORE we do it. I mean the sense that C.S. Lewis considered and articulated, that there IS no before or after for God because he is not limited to spacetime as we are. He simply sees us making our free choices outside of the time line.
Oh the places logic can take us, beyond where it can take us in the empirical realm alone. So long as our metaphysics is consistent with the objective empirical evidence I think our faith is quite reasonable and explains oddities in our psyche like longings for civility, justice, and survival. Nature’s testimony alone on these oddities is hopeless as I examine the situation.
I think we are looking for far more than survival, but company. We are looking for life. But what if contact has already been made? I fear we may have missed the obvious and dismissed as primitive, that which was far more sophisticated than we ever imagined or manufactured in our own infant minds.
1 John 1:2 The life appeared; we have seen it and testify to it, and we proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and has appeared to us.
I’m predicting at least three planets will be found orbiting KIC 8462. One slightly larger than Earth, one about the same size as Uranus and one about 3 times the size of Jupiter.