PAUL OWENS: Mea culpa.
A reader pointed out that we had the wrong year in Thursday morning’s paper for local baseball legend Paul Owens’ death.
Paul Owens died Dec. 26, 2003.
MYSTERY: EarthSky.org reported Thursday on a current initiative to find out the meaning of an odd sighting in space.
A Kickstarter campaign raising funding for the project indicates the initiative is focused on a star called KIC 8462852 — or Tabby’s Star — was observed while people were watching for variations of starlight in an attempt to find planets. See, when a planet moves between us and the star, it would cause dimming of the light.
While volunteers sifted through data collected by Kepler spacecraft to aid in the planet search, they found strange starlight variations. One possible answer is quite strange — a giant object built by an alien race.
EarthSky said astronomers “are still struggling to explain its strange fluctuations, first noticed in citizen scientist observations in the Planet Hunters project, using data collected by the Kepler spacecraft. Yes, the idea of alien megastructures — aka Dyson spheres — being built around this star to harvest its energy is alive and well.”
A Dyson sphere is only one theory. Another theory is “a swarm of comets passing in front of the star and blocking the star’s light,” according to the Kickstarter page.
Whatever it is, it will take a great deal more data for skywatchers to figure it out, and it would not be practical to rely on government-funded resources for the project, the Kickstarter page explains. The chance to solve the mystery will likely involve putting together a private telescope network to watch each night Tabby’s Star and collect data.
If you do a search in Google for “the most mysterious star in the galaxy,” you will find not only the Kickstarter campaign, but also a TED Talk on the mysterious star.
To give you an idea of how big the task of building a Dyson sphere would be, our solar system’s own sun is 2,713,406 miles in circumference, and “you could line up 109 Earths across the face of the sun.” If humans wanted to build something around the sun, how would we even get materials?
