https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper...
https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...
They also contain links to the resulting paper itself
> Is this the last remaining explanation after Montet/Simon?
> The dimming comes from the shadow of a spaceship traveling on an (almost) straight line from KIC8462852 to Earth. The slow continuous dimming results from the increase of the apparent size of the approaching ship while Earth/Kepler is in the penumbra. The irregular dips happen when Kepler accidentally passes the antumbra. A rough estimation by simple geometry would suggest that the alien spaceship is quite big (> 100 km diameter), significantly slower than light velocity (< 0.05 c) and has now almost reached its goal (< 2 ly away), arriving at Earth within the next 100 years after a journey of several 10,000 years. (cf. http://archimedes.soup.io/post/632873371/) The c200 days of "rapid decreased flux" between Kepler-day 1100 and 1300 (first half of 2012) which Monet/Simon reported, followed by a series of large dips after day 1500, would suggest a course correction with the space ship now on its final homing trajectory. -- Comments?
-- https://www.reddit.com/r/KIC8462852/comments/4w7qfi/ben_mont...
Why even assume it's a spaceship and not an asteroid or a rogue planet?
But yes, that's exactly the theory, that the starship is somewhere between us and them, and it sometimes dips into the focal point of light.
The object[s] would have to be lined up. That's why an artificial object intentionally traveling to Earth is in some sense more plausible than an asteroid, which could be headed in any direction.
Specifity bias. It "feels" more probable to have object going here because someone send it here, than to just have object going here.
A ship can sail a straight line from Falmouth to Boston, but that motion can be described as an arc because of the curvature of the Earth. Add in the motion of Earth's orbit, and the shape of that motion changes again. Add in the Solar System's motion relative to the Galactic Centre, and it's yet another shape.
It's all a matter of perspective :-)
You indeed can change a curve into a straight line by manipulating the frame of reference, but it would need to be very contrived - basically you follow the object movement and add constant translation and some linear movement on top of that (one example - camera is in on a kite tied to the ship, and the rope is progressively loosened).
> That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is.
> The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that the ship would stay within that cone as it corrects for the motion of our Solar System (and its own) within our galaxy. Remember that this dimming effect has been observable for several decades.
Then again, aliens don't have any obligation to make sense to us.
[1] : https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper...
The corollary: if there are aliens around KIC 8462852 they don't care that what they're doing is visible for 1500 light years around them.
A while back I had a plan for a science fiction setting: an intergalactic ship is approach Earth. The people who sent it thought big, and as a result the ship has at its core an enclosed star (a miniature Dyson Sphere) as a gravitational anchor and power source, and round it is orbiting a vast swarm of asteroids and habitats with a few million times the living space of Earth, inside which civilisations endlessly rise and fall.
The plot centred around this thing going to make a class pass by Sol in a few years at 0.01c, with the gravitational effects pretty much dooming the Earth; so the current lead civilisation sends some ships on ahead to evacuate the Earth. (Big ships. I did the maths.)
The story never gelled, but I think it's plausible that my ship would produce these effects.
BTW, if this turns out to be true, I want credit.
is kinda similar
Terre en fuite (Fleeing Earth) (1960) by François Bordes (pen name Francis Carsac), though, there is still no translation in english of that gem, where Earth and Venus was converted to spaceships for running away from exploding Sun!
You cool if we blame you too? :)
a) Tabby's Star is roughly 1500 light years away from us; we only began emitting radio signals ~150 years ago (at most -- assuming propagation from early telegraph wires; not actually very likely) and it'd take ~3000 years for our signals to reach the vicinity of Tabby's Star and indications of a reaction getting back to us,
b) "Military" is a category error on this scale; the energy budget required to generate the sort of luminosity changes we're seeing around Tabby's Star by deliberately occulting it are mind-blowing compared to anything we've ever achieved. Might as well speculate about an ant-hill (us) wondering about the military intentions of an M1 Abrams tank driving across the Iraqi desert (hypothetical alien actors at Tabby's star) -- either they aren't going to drive over us, or we just encountered an Outside Context Problem.
B) sure.
can it be easily ruled out?
At 2 light years for instance, that spacecraft would trace an apparent ellipse 3.3" in diameter, while Tabby's star (1,480 ly) would be stationary (0.004" parallax). In comparison, the star's apparent disk is just 30 μas wide (0.00003").
However, I wonder if there is a way to save the idea without requiring a ridiculously large spacecraft? Suppose instead of one ginormous ship, it is a fleet of big ships each big enough to cause irregular dimming if that ship happens to get between Earth and KIC8462852. If the fleet is spread out, it could then be that one ship or another ends up between Earth and KIC8462852 at several times during one Earth orbit around the Sun.
That would give us the irregular dimming throughout the year.
For the slow continuous dimming, perhaps that is something going on with the star itself. That could be what made the inhabitants of the system decide to build a fleet of big ships and leave their weirdly behaving and very scary star.