KIC 8462852 or “Tabby’s Star” was made popular in 2015 because of the star’s strange characteristic. This was announced by a team led by astronomer Tabetha Boyaijian of Yale University, hence the name “Tabby’s Star.” NASA’s Kepler space telescope detected fluctuations in the star’s light signature in 2011 and then again in 2013. The star is about 1,500 light years away from Earth. Overtime, it has dimmed dramatically in over just four years.
As the mystery of Tabby’s star continue to baffle people and scientists alike, certain theories have come up. Reports have been calling this the ‘Most mysterious Star in our Galaxy.’ Let’s take a look at what scientists and researchers say about this controversy.
NASA Spitzer Telescope suggests family of comets, collision of planetary bodies
A study headed by Massimo Marengo of Iowa Sate University says that through the analysis data collected by NASA Spitzer Telescope they would know if it is either comets passing across the star or debris from a colliding planetoids that is causing this phenomenon. Infrared light would point to planetary collision however they found none and presence of comets would be impossible to detect research says. According to New Atllas, Massimo Marengo had this to say, “We may not know yet what’s going on around this star,But that’s what makes it so interesting.”
Analysis of light signature, Alien Megastructure, Extra terrestrial
Paper research suggested that an alien megastructure could have been responsible for this unexplained behavior. Because of this theory, Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) used its Alien Telescope Array (ATA) to detect any sign of extra terrestrial beings. To their disappointment, they fond no evidence whatsoever.
Benjamin Montet (California Institute of Technology and the Harvard-Simthsonian Center for Astrophysics) and Joshua Simon (Observatories of the Carnergie Institution of Washington) made a reanalyisis of Kepler’s observations and paid attention to its light signaure from 2009 till 2013. According to them, the star dimmed by 3 percent during that period and a 2 percent brightness over a 200 day period. These scientists say that this behavior is not like any other star in the galaxy. It is just not a normal star activity.
With all of these analysis, results and research, the comet hypothesis becomes a much more doubtful explanation to the phenomenon that occurs in Tabby’s star. Montet and Simon even had to say this in their new study uploaded in the preprint site ArXiv, “No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.”