Tabetha Boyajian – Astronomy Now

New data debunks alien megastructure theory on mysterious “Tabby’s Star”

3 January 2018 Astronomy Now

A team of more than 100 researchers is one step closer to solving the mystery behind the “most mysterious star in the Universe.” KIC 8462852, or “Tabby’s Star,” nicknamed after Boyajian, is otherwise an average star. It is about 50 percent bigger and 1,000 degrees hotter than the Sun. It is more than 1,000 light-years away. However, it has been inexplicably dimming and brightening sporadically like no other. Several theories abound to explain the star’s unusual light patterns including an alien megastructure orbiting the star.

The Galaxy’s strangest star dims again

24 May 2017 Keith Cooper

A sudden dimming in brightness of Tabby’s Star, famed for its large and puzzling fades, has triggered a frenzy of observations as astronomers hurry to try to get to the bottom of what is rapidly become one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy.

Breakthrough Listen to search for intelligent life around weird star

27 October 2016 Astronomy Now

Tabby’s star, otherwise known as KIC 8462852, has provoked so much excitement over the past year, with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilisation capable of building orbiting megastructures, that UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any extraterrestrial signals.

Milky Way’s most-mysterious star is even stranger than astronomers thought

4 October 2016 Astronomy Now

A star known as KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus has been raising eyebrows both in and outside of the scientific community for the past year. In 2015 a team of astronomers announced that the star underwent a series of very brief, non-periodic dimming events while being monitored by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. A new study has deepened the mystery.

Kepler finds Tabby’s Star is mysteriously dimming

8 August 2016 Keith Cooper

The so-called ‘most mysterious star in the galaxy’, also known as KIC 8462852, Tabby’s Star, the WTF (‘where’s the flux’) star and the ‘alien megastructure star’, has become even stranger according to new analysis of old observations from Kepler.

Natural causes, not aliens, explain mystery star’s behaviour

10 May 2016 Astronomy Now

Media interest went viral last October when a group of astronomers from Pennsylvania State University cited that the “bizarre light curve” of KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby’s star, was “consistent with” a swarm of alien-constructed megastructures. Now, the results of a new study make it far less likely that KIC 8462852 is the home of industrious extraterrestrials.

UPDATED: Are comet fragments best explanation for mysterious dimming star?

25 November 2015 Keith Cooper

A star called KIC 8462852 has been in the news recently for unexplained and bizarre behaviour. NASA’s Kepler mission had monitored the star for four years, observing two unusual incidents, in 2011 and 2013, when the star’s light dimmed in dramatic, never-before-seen ways. Something had passed in front of the star and blocked its light, but what?