By James Davenport, John Ruan

kepler astronomy

"Tabby's Star" is an anomalous F star with repeated short-term variability, and a steady 3% dimming over 4-years. The star spent ~8% of the Kepler 4-year light curve in the short-duration dimming state. As LaCourse notes, no analog has been found with Kepler. Neither the short- or long-term variability in this object are currently understood so discoveries of additional examples are desperately needed.

Stripe82 was a 10-year multi-epoch photometric catalog by SDSS, covering ~300 sq deg with 70-90 epochs in ugriz. More than 10,000 objects were identified as variable with F star colors from Stripe82, with many likely pulsators or eclipsing binaries. The photometric precision of Stripe82 is sufficient to detect the long-term, non-stationary variability observed from "Tabby's Star". Additionally, the 8% duty cycle of short-term dimming events should stand out as several aperiodic outliers in the Stripe82 light curves. Finally, the near-simultaneous multi-band data from SDSS may provide important clues as to nature of this new class of variable star.

Journal of Brief Ideas references The NASA K2 Mission has yet to observe an analog of Tabby's Star

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