Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star

“Pathetic Earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would’ve hidden from it in terror.” – Flash Gordon (1980)

How many horses could you fit in a pyramid?  A pharaoh mount.

Way back in the before time, say 2015, a scientific paper by one Tabetha Boyajian hit the news.  Oh, boy, did it hit the news.  What Boyajian had discovered was a particular little F class star that dimmed.  And not dimmed like Joe Biden in the afternoon when the meds wear off and Jill has to put him in the special dark room.

The dimming was unusual.  It wasn’t a planet.  It wasn’t a comet.  It wasn’t like anything anyone had ever really seen.  Because of that, she got a star that’s now known by several names, the most common of which is Tabby’s Star.

Kinda cool, right?  Some also call it Boyajian’s Star, and other sticks in the mud call it KIC 8462852 (A), but I think all of the people who like to call it KIC 8462852 (A) work at the Interstellar DMV and have to share the same soul on alternating weekends.

The reason for all of that excitement is because Tabby’s Star can’t be explained by any sort of physical processes we yet know of.  If it were the usual “stuff” we’d expect to see the light from the star absorbed in the physical material and re-radiated outward as heat, likely because the kids won’t turn the damn thermostat down in winter.

I kid.  It’s all physics.  This is what happens when light from the Sun hits my driveway.  The energy from the light warms the driveway, and the energy from the light ends up going away by radiation and convection (because there’s an atmosphere).  It’s also what happens when a picture of an attractive girl in a bikini is taken:  it’s sheer thermodynamics that makes her hot.

Entropy:  it isn’t what it used to be.

We’d expect that any matter that got hit by the light from Tabby’s star to warm up, and we’d see infrared energy like from a driveway or a supermodel.  Seriously, if you want the actual math, you came to the wrong place, though I will say I was the first person to calculate how much PEZ® and anti-PEZ™ it would take to cross the Milky Way, and the very first person to ever use the term “anti-PEZ©” (LINK).

There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic.  Like nanobots.  But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.

None.  However, I thought (based on my prior reading) that around 2019 they called it solved.

Nope.  Not solved.  I found this out by listening to a YouTube® vidya from The Angry Astronaut.  I’ve only recently found him, and have enjoyed the videos I’ve seen so far.  Here’s how he describes himself from his Patreon® page:

“I create unique educational videos which focus on Spaceflight, Space Policy and Space Science. My approach is unconventional, and sometimes controversial. The future of our species depends on an aggressive effort to explore and colonize the Solar System…something that we have woefully neglected for too long. It is time to stop being polite and start getting ANGRY!”

To be clear, I like the cut of his jib, as my constant criticism of NASA might indicate.  An example is here (LINK).

I hear there are flat-Earth people all across the globe.

In the video I watched, The Angry Astronaut noted something I was unaware of – not only was the problem of Tabby’s Star completely not solved, but an astrophysicist from the University of Nebraska, Dr. Edward G. Schmidt, had found more stars that acted like this.  The Angry Astronaut was kind enough to point me in the right direction for Dr. Schmidt’s paper.  Hats off, sir!

More stars!  Excellent!  That means that, whatever is causing the issue is probably natural.

Then I read the paper.  You can read it here (LINK).  You can watch The Angry Astronaut talk about it below (don’t forget to like and subscribe!).

Dr. Schmidt found this dipping in several stars, and those he found were all in F and G type stars.  For reference, my favorite star, the Sun, is a G-type star.  F-type stars are a little bigger and a little brighter.  Together, they make up about 6% of the stars in the Milky Way, my favorite galaxy.  They are long-lived, and are probably in the sweet spot to have habitable planets since 100% of the planets we have found life on exist around a similar sized star.

So, Schmidt looks at stars.  Finds more that periodically dim in just this same exact weird way that no one can explain, but only around very specific kinds of stars nearly exactly like ours.

Is every mattress he sleeps on queen-sized?

The great news is that they’re randomly distributed all over the place, so it’s probably natural, and the whole thing is common.  Oops.

No.  Not really common at all.  They looked at over 1,337,101 stars in the study areas.  They came up that these stars showing the dimming were very rare, with between 11.2 and 4.9 candidate dimming stars per million depending on the region reviewed.

Not common.

But randomly distributed, right?

No.  Look at the graph below.  The circle with the dot in it is my favorite Sun and my favorite planet.  The star is Tabby’s Star.  The filled-in dots represent stars that dim like Tabby’s Star in a specific region.  The open ones are stars that have the dimming outside of that region.

Why two graphs?  Because I can’t send you a three-dimensional post, and I snagged it from Dr. Schmidt’s paper.  Pretend one is looking at the stars from the top, and one is looking at the stars from the side.  Yup.  They’re all in a bunch.

(from the Schmidt paper linked above)

So, we have this really rare phenomenon, and it happens only in stars of approximately the same size, and is concentrated in this one particular area.

I mean, if a civilization were harvesting the energy from specific types of stars and spreading out to make a galactic empire, what would it look like?

It would look exactly like this.  I should know, because I watched the 1980 film Flash Gordon and I’m pretty sure that this is exactly what Ming the Merciless™ did before James Bond helped the blonde dude save every one of us and then end up with more hot chicks in bikinis.

Okay, not a bikini.  But it was Alien.

I’m spitballing from the data, but I’m thinking that the closest one of these stars is about 750 lightyears (3 liters) from Earth, which is generally farther than I like to do on a daily commute.  Heck, I’m not sure my odometer even goes up that far!

What is it?  We don’t know.  It might be the stars in question keep forgetting to pay the power bill and keep getting disconnected.  It might be that billions of clones of Lizzo are in orbit around some of these stars, because I don’t think anyone has yet tested that hypothesis.

Or it could be . . . aliens?

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

34 thoughts on “Bikinis, Aliens, And Tabby’s Star”

  1. Now that is very interesting. I was aware of Tabby’s Star, but not Schmitt’s work finding lots of clustered Tabbys. It’s like he’s herding cats. Which reminds me of another science paper everybody should know about. Seriously, you need to read this:

    https://igorchudov.substack.com/p/infertility-virus-to-sterilize-stray

    But I digress when I say cats hold the key to the next Wuhan outbreak leading to human extinction. Back to Tabby’s Star. Which that paragon of knowledge Scientific American covered in an increasingly rare burst of lucidity:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/have-aliens-built-huge-structures-around-boyajian-rsquo-s-star/

    When people look at massive changes in starlight and say “ET”, they are alluding to gigantic (and I mean GIGANTIC) alien megastructures eclipsing the stars from our point of view – like Niven’s Ringworld or Dyson Spheres. If such structures exist around Tabby’s Star, they would warm up and radiate their own characteristic infra-red radiation. And by an amazing coincidence we now happen to have a exquisite new infra-red telescope that might be able to actually see them – the Webb telescope. And a proposal for Webb to take a look at Tabby’s Star in the upcoming Cycle 2 observation targets has been approved.

    https://www.stsci.edu/jwst/phase2-public/2757.pdf

    Stay tuned, Earthlings.

    PS – Angry Astronaut is great. I also watch Tim Dodd, The Everyday Astronaut, who has been chosen for the crew of the upcoming dearMoon Starship lunar orbit mission, and Felix over on What About It for his EXCELLENT coverage of ongoing SpaceX progress.

    1. I’m really looking forward to the Tabby’s Star data coming through. Could be a big deal.

  2. I recall when this first came out. I shrugged, muttered, “ringworlds,” and went on.
    Assuming trans-lightspeed is impossible, ringworlds and Dyson Spheres are a civilization’s only option (given a limited lifespan; some of my sentient androids talk about interstellar travel).

      1. What about bandersnatch on Europa?

        ***

        Okay, Laszlo thought, attempting to land here might have been a bad idea, after all. His co-pilot and friend, the android Minerva, had tried to talk him out of it, but there was so much under the ice of Europa that was unknown.
        The Empress, my mother, ordered us out here as scouts. This is our job. Yes, a massive unknown, and driving our small ship, Lionheart, through the ice was a little risky. But we’re the only ones out here. And, he thought guiltily, another chance to put down my mother’s Standard.
        The oxygen readout in the faceplate of his hardsuit changed from yellow to red. I’ve ten minutes left. When he shifted slightly in his crouch – being still was ease itself for demi-humans such as he – the thing at the cave mouth also shifted.
        There is life here. We had no idea. It, admittedly, looks like a slug, but whatever it secretes dissolved my toolbox in the five minutes before I knew it was behind me. That bodes ill for me just pushing past it.
        After noticing it as he was exiting the ice cave, Laszlo had turned on the gain of his suit’s mikes. The forty-mile-per-hour wind was a howl but the slug seemed to make no noise at all.
        A Bandersnatch, he thought, smiling while looking at what might kill him, that’s what I’ll call it. Not that anyone will know.
        It’s not come for me. And moves slowly; understandable in this climate. I can probably barrel into it and past, but its secretions will begin to dissolve my hardsuit. The ship is thirty minutes away and in this damned cave, Min has no idea what has happened.
        He shifted again. The bandersnatch did, too.
        I should be on Earth. I should be prepping to be Mother’s heir; emperor. And I’m in a fucking cave on Europa.
        I guess I have nothing to lose? He stood to a crouch and tensed –
        Captain? Minerva asked to his mind, wrapping her android’s arms around the beast and tossing it aside. Androids from Somi Corporation were famously strong. Why didn’t you call?
        Out of signal. He ran to the cave entrance and took the flesh of her exposed hand. The slug was recovering and moving back toward them. Until your mind was close to mine. Let’s get out of here, now!
        Of course, sir. They loped in the low gravity, leaving the bandersnatch behind. Twenty minutes later, at the ship…
        Twenty minutes, Min. Is your skin okay? he asked.
        Mild frostbite. If it is serious, I’ll tear it off to not offend you on our trip home.
        Home? When did…?
        I’ve a message from your cousin, Regent Aurelia. We are to report to Mars at top speed.
        Into Lionheart’s airlock, he took his helmet off and his friend into his arms.
        “Thank you, Min,” Crown Prince Laszlo said, voice thick with emotion.
        “I love you too, sir.”

      2. Oh, I would bet that non-intelligent life is nearly everywhere that isn’t frozen or on fire. But can they make beer?

    2. Yeah, no problem if you’re a machine. But think in terms of sending out Von Neumann machines with biofactories to set up in new places. Might just explain us.

  4. “It makes me laugh to hear you say how far you’ve come
    When you barely know how to use your thumb
    So you know how t’ count t’ one”
    ~ Flash Gordon’s Ape

  5. I think you may be missing the point. No matter (see exception below) what is blocking the light / energy output it should still be radiated in some form. And we believe we could detect it.
    Even a Dyson sphere would radiate the energy of the contained star – it would just be spread over the larger outer surface of the sphere, which presumably could do so as heat or in other forms.
    The exceptions would be if (gritting my teeth) the energy was converted to mass that was then used to build these hypothetical structures. Or if the mass was being thrown out rather than heat / radiation (remember mass/energy sort of the same thing?) Even if something was turning energy into mass and then into structures, eventually they would complete construction, and the radiation would begin again.
    The detection thing is interesting too – heat is just a different form of radiation in this case. Could they be discharging it at a temperature near the background temp of the universe (4 K or whatever that number is?) That might make it very hard to detect. And implies pretty good technology since thermodynamics implies their efficiency of conversion would be ‘holy crap that is good.’ We are lucky to get 40% routinely from real power plants.
    Its nice to have poorly understood things happening – this is where innovation and real science is conducted. Rather than so much of today’s ‘science’ and research that is just technological expansion of well modeled/understood phenomena.

    2. Or, maybe, Tabby IS radiating away a lot of energy, but it’s not being radiated toward us?

    3. Yup. My bet was antimatter production. Send the web out and have them make stored energy while-u-wait.

  7. I loved Flash Gordon as a lil’ Shaver and Max von Sydow as Ming is great, older brothers gave me several Chinese haircuts for that and smashed all the Bee Gees albums!
    Black holes are racists and stars are a construct of the white male patriarchy. (honk!)
    Loving all the NASA (Muslim Outreach) takedowns on Gab.
    I don’t agree or disagree, it is fun to think about things.
    Aliens will never come to Scotty Beam Up world unless some really big Sarmat style nukes start flying.
    We are the low tier level one of the universe and if you are taken to our “leaders” you would head the other direction light speed fast.
    About the NASA moon landing is fake, if you go high enough up a mountain you can see the curvature.
    Really craving some mountain action but the CPUSA has taken over and I won’t be returning to hostile occupied enemy territory.

  8. I was going to say that if they used Kepler, the clustering is explained by the fact that Kepler stared at a very narrow angular range of the sky. But apparently it’s from the Northern Sky Variability survey – still looking for the details on the instruments.

    1. Yup. Let me know what you find!! I have the good Dr.’s email (I don’t know him and haven’t contacted him, but have it from online) if you need.

  9. To any ‘alien’ existing there, we are alien;.so which alien would be considered stranger?

  10. Somewhere out there is the truth, and most people will become sniveling imbeciles if they find out. Regardless of intentions, if aliens are here, their technology far surpasses anything we have, and my guess would be we’re being examined like white mice in a cage.

  11. In no particular order:

    1) “There is one model that says the particles around Tabby’s have to be small, perhaps microscopic.”
    I’m pretty sure that must have been one of the models in a bikini in the included picture. Hubba hubba.

    2) “But, regardless, eight years after Tabby’s paper was published, there is no physical process that has been found that would explain what’s going on.”
    As Dwight would say, “FALSE.”
    You need only ask Greta Farbissina, the fetal-alcohol dropout from Sweden, and she would assure you the stars are winking, waxing, and waning, because of carbon pollution from Earth, obviously. And that if we only pay more in taxes to One World Government, polar bears on Tabby’s Star won’t all die from lack of ice floes.
    If you need data on that, call the Church Of Global Warmism, and they can gin some up for you in a day or two. C.O.D. orders take an extra week.

    3) It bears repeating that nothing but Voyager has even made it beyond the limit of this solar system (by which I mean the orbit of Pluto, which is still a planet no matter what the revisionist hissyfitters claim).
    I point this out to underline that no one ever, anywhere has any first-hand observations of the galaxy farther away than that, nor closer to even the nearest star.

    The significance of that truth being that for all anyone knows (not believes, for any value of evidence or faith), the entire universe could be nothing more than holes poked in God’s Enormous Black Velvet Drapery.
    And if it were so, it would look exactly like the current model of the universe, from here.
    Just saying.

    All I suggest is that prognostications about things so far away they’re measured in imaginary distances (or metric measurements, which amount to the same thing) should probably come wrapped in a wee bit more humility. 😉

    Or at least, come accompanied by a suitable bribe of ice cream and Thin Mints.

    1. 1) I had a pic with even smaller bikinis, but it was nearly dental floss.

      2) Hahahahaha! She’s 18 or 19 now. I’m still hoping that someone will wife her up and shut her up.

      3) And most of Voyager’s instruments have been turned off to save power because that plutonium power pack is older than the last good Star Wars movie. And, yup, Pluto deserves to be back as a planet.

      If it’s God’s Enormous Black Velvet Drapery, it sure is nice looking. And I wouldn’t want to paint it. That would take forever!

      1. “1) I had a pic with even smaller bikinis, but it was nearly dental floss.”

        You say that like it was a bad thing…

        1. It’s not at all. And, come to think of it, the search engines could hardly throttle me more . . .

      2. Sidenote:

        1) Within the concept of forever, time itself isn’t even a thimble full of ocean. So all of time would be functionally No Time At All.
        2) Should God exist, not wanting to paint it if asked would constitute Original Sin. The penalty for that is allegedly rather harsh.
        3) A better strategy might be not so much declining the honor of painting it, and more like inducing Someone Else to volunteer for the job. cf. Tom Sawyer’s efforts along that line.

        Just saying.

        1. 1) Yes. We live in an instant, except when we are in the DMV.

          2) I didn’t say I didn’t want to paint it, I’m just lazy and have to be shamed into getting off the couch. God absolutely smashes me across the face when I ignore him. Why do you think I write????

          3) If I’m lazy enough, The Boy and Pugsley ignore my comment that I’ll help them move the bed and let me not help them. It took years, but it’s worth it.

    2. “It bears repeating that nothing but Voyager has even made it beyond the limit of this solar system (by which I mean the orbit of Pluto, which is still a planet no matter what the revisionist hissyfitters claim).
      I point this out to underline that no one ever, anywhere has any first-hand observations of the galaxy farther away than that, nor closer to even the nearest star. The significance of that truth being that for all anyone knows (not believes, for any value of evidence or faith), the entire universe could be nothing more than holes poked in God’s Enormous Black Velvet Drapery. And if it were so, it would look exactly like the current model of the universe, from here.”

      Well, two responses, actually.

      First, in addition to Voyagers 1 and 2 there have also been Pioneers 1 and 2 (now deactivated) as well as New Horizons (still in great shape and going strong looking for another flyby target) that have passed Pluto’s orbit. In fact, New Horizons specifically flew by Pluto and the even more distant Ultima Thule, er, politically correct name Arrokoth taking beautiful pictures of both.

      Second, the ONLY way to observe something is to monitor and collect and measure that which it gives off – like photons, electrons, ions, atoms, smelly molecules and gravity waves. These are all valid ways to observe something whether you have physically passed its spatial location or whether it lies an unimaginable and unattainable distance ahead of you. One of the greatest achievements of science has been to show the universality of processes. The spectrograph of a gas in the lab matches the spectrograph of a distant star or galaxy and so one can infer the composition of a star mankind will never fly past. (In fact, helium was first identified from lines in the Sun’s spectrum before it ever was isolated on Earth to fill party balloons!) Gravity waves, ripples in the fabric of space itself, are now measured down in the Louisiana bayous to watch the collisions of black holes and neutron stars occur through a time lens of billions of years ago. The sky is not “blue during the day and black at night” – in fact, red shifted photons from the Big Bang cause the cosmic microwave background now painting the entire sky with a constant, almost-uniform color our eyes cannot see, and from those patches which are oh-ever-so-slightly brighter came galaxies and us. The Sun’s helium, the merging of black holes, the formation of the galaxies – none of these are less real just because humans have not physically reached their locations. Monitoring these things with telescopes on the ground, or with laser beams under the ground, or with satellites in orbit around the Earth – ALL of these constitute FIRST-HAND observations. And we are incredibly lucky to live in a time where they are made in real time with the excitement of discovery surrounding them, not just dusty historical facts taught to bored schoolkids who are mostly paying attention to their social media feeds and not the teacher anyway.

      But to be honest, there is absolutely no evidence contradicting the Holes In God’s Enormous Black Velvet Drapery Theory, either. So…the choice is Observable Universe, or Observable Universe With Extra God Hidden Behind Curtain. This is where the obligatory reference to Occam’s Razor comes in.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

      1. Aw, Ricky, and you were doing so well…until you baubled the catch short of the end zone.

        The correct statement of the problem isn’t nearly so favorable for “sciencism”.
        It is “Holes In God’s Enormous Black Velvet Drapery Theory”, vs. The Combined Works Of Keppler, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, et al.

        Occam’s Razor favors the former, and shreds the latter.
        You could look it up.

        So at best, maybe that’s not the test theorem you want to apply.
        (Hint: Trying to overexplain things is what got the entire Catholic Church on the wrong end of Galileo – and reality – once upon a time. There’s a perpetual lesson there, both ways. I.e. “If you think a theory is wrong, explain how the universe would appear from this vantage point if it were true, and contrast that with reality.”)

        I’m not arguing either end of the greater discussion, merely pointing out that no matter how elegant, elaborate, or dressed up in scientific lingo the guesses are, at the end of the day, they’re still only guesses, which actual science discards like tissues at a soap opera convention every single day. “Settled science” is an oxymoron.

        One need look no farther than coelacanths, which lie 3 billion miles closer to home than Pluto, yet everyone’s best guesses labelled them EXTINCT, from 66,000,000 years ago, right up until simple fishermen started pulling them up from the oceans’ depths in 1938.

        Oops.
        Marine Biology as taught by Emily Litella.

        Then there were literally thousands of medical experts – pretty much every single one in the entire world – who assured everyone for decades on top of decades that stomach ulcers were caused by acid, and only surgeical excisions could correct them. They were sure that some obscure Australian humble internist, who imagined them to frequently be the byproduct of harmful bacteria treatable with ordinary antibiotics, was plainly a lunatic. After years upon years of scorn and ridicule, they gave him a Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005 by way of apologizing for the fact that their years of derision and guesswork were flatly wrong.

        The list of similar stories in science is endless.

        A generous helping of humility, when speaking about things they’ve never been to, and about which they don’t even know that they don’t even know, would go a long way to rescuing science from the clutches of dope-smoking morons and crack-fueled would-be overlords, and returning it to the realm of the pursuit of knowledge, with some modicum of accuracy, and only as well as it can see.

        When anyone’s photos of Tabby’s Star, or any other thing located recockulous distances from here, are as sharply detailed as those by someone with a Nikon doing a fly-by, give a holler.
        Until then, illustrated guesses go by the handy trade name: cartoons.
        Of necessity.

        Thus endeth the lesson.

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