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Bobs [soylentnews.org] writes:

"The star KIC 8462852 (aka 'Tabby's Star') got a lot of press late last year because it was acting funny. It was undergoing a series of apparently random dips in brightness. Some of these dips were serious, with the amount of starlight dropping a staggering 22 percent.

That’s a lot. It couldn’t be a planet passing in front of the star, because the dips weren’t periodic, and the amount of starlight blocked is different every time. Plus, even a planet as big as Jupiter (which is about as big as planets can get) would block less than one percent of the star’s light at best.

That left some speculation about, um, aliens. While it’s incredibly unlikely, it does kinda fit what we’re seeing.

...We just found out it’s even weirder than we thought.

Bradley Schaefer is an astronomer at Lousiana State University found that Tabby’s Star has been photographed over 1,200 times as part of a repeated all-sky survey between the years 1890 – 1989.

What he found is rather astonishing: The star has been fading in brightness over that period, dropping by about 20 percent!

That’s… bizarre. Tabby’s Star is, by all appearances, a normal F-type star: hotter, slightly more massive, and bigger than our Sun. These stars basically just sit there and steadily turn hydrogen into helium. There have been times where the star has dimmed quite a bit, then brightened up again in the following years. On average, the star is fading about 16 percent per century, but that’s hardly steady.

So it appears Tabby’s Star dims and brightens again on all kinds of timescales: hours, days, weeks, even decades and centuries.

Again. That’s bizarre. Nothing like this has ever been seen." Above excerpted from Article: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/01/18/tabby_s_star_faded_substantially_over_past_century.html [slate.com]

  They say it can't be caused by large dust cloud because they would see a known and detectable IR signature. So, aliens? Are they blinking at us in their 'morse code'? Building a hyperspace bypass? Got a better idea?

Schaefer's paper: KIC8462852 Faded at an Average Rate of 0.165±0.013 Magnitudes Per Century From 1890 To 1989 http://arxiv.org/pdf/1601.03256v1.pdf [arxiv.org]

F-type stars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-type_main-sequence_star [wikipedia.org]

Original about oddness in Oct 2015: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2015/10/14/weird_star_strange_dips_in_brightness_are_a_bit_baffling.html [slate.com]

FYI: The dimming is not caused by rapid rotation os star: https://twitter.com/Astro_Wright/status/689163586749333504 [twitter.com]

Original Submission