Calling All Space Sleuths

What is casting an enormous shadow on KIC8462852?

     Ever since 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been circling the Earth's sun once every 371 days. What it looks for is changes in the brightness of hundreds of thousands of sun-like stars in one part of the galaxy. Just as from Earth, we see an eclipse when the moon occasionally blocks our sun, Kepler looks for a dimming, or eclipse, caused by a planet moving in front of any of the suns it watches.

     On October 13, 2015, readers of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society saw that Yale University astronomer, Tabetha Boyajian, had spotted an irregularly shaped 20% dip in the brightness emitted by the sun, KIC8462852. Since the diameter of our sun is nearly a million miles, it would take something on the order of 200,000 miles by 200,000 miles to block out 20% of its brightness. Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, would dim KIC8462852 by only 1%. In short, whatever passed in front of this distant sun was enormous.

     Could this huge object be collecting KIC8462852's energy as Jason Wright, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, theorized and like the Dyson sphere that appears in science fiction? Less exotic explanations include: matter that has yet to come together in a planet, a gas cloud, or a comet's head.

     And what if there is alien life on the object that ventured past KIC8462852? In eight countries, the NASA-funded Wisconsin Astrobiology Research consortium of 57 scientists in the fields of geology, microbiology, chemistry, and engineering is on the hunt. The consortium looks for the records the simplest organic life forms might leave in water and volcanic environments and the roles oxygen and methane play in microbial evolution.

     William Borucki, who helped design NASA's Kepler Space Telescope at the Ames Research Center in California, found that the Earth's sun is much younger and more intense than most other stars in the universe. Than's good news for young, intense scientists looking for future work in what Borucki is convinced is a "universe...much more wonderfully complex" than he ever imagined.

             (Also check out earlier posts: "Hunt for Moon Rocks, "Who Needs International
                                                Expertise?" and "Space Explorers.")