By Daryll LaCourse

astronomy kepler astrophysics crowdsourcing

Tabby's Star is a main sequence F-class star (KIC 8462852) observed by the NASA Kepler spacecraft to undergo significant aperiodic dimming activity across a four year baseline. The light curve was noted as novel amongst a pool of ~150,000 targets through visual inspection performed by participants of the PlanetHunters.org project. Boyajian, et al. (2015) reported an analysis which attempted to model the enigmatic behavior under various scenarios, with a swarm of exo-comets offered as a potential (but problematic) leading explanation. Subsequent follow-up studies failed to detect a significant IR excess or the presence of close stellar companions. Wright, et al. (2015) offered an alternative explanation invoking transits of alien-megastructures, which may not produce a detectable IR excess or radial velocity signal.

To date, a robust model to explain the behavior of Tabby's Star remains elusive.

The Kepler spacecraft is now observing a series of new ecliptic fields (K2) and has accumulated observations of ~165,000 additional targets. Continued visual inspection of these public data has failed to recover an analog to KIC 8462852. Lack of such a detection suggests that the aperiodic dimming indeed represents a rare astrophysical phenomenon, regardless of the true root cause mechanism involved. Future photometric surveys by K2 and TESS will offer additional opportunity to search for such analogs.

Ideas citing this work Searching for "Tabby's Star" Analogs in Stripe 82

Attachment: 8462852_LC_img.png (142 KB)

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