What's Up With the 'Alien Megastructure?'
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- čas přidán 21. 10. 2015
- The Kepler space telescope found a star that randomly gets really dim, and some people are suggesting the star’s being blocked by a huge alien structure. It’s… probably not aliens, though.
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Sources:
arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf
www.space.com/30849-bizarre-ke...
www.space.com/30855-alien-life...
www.theatlantic.com/science/ar...
www.washingtonpost.com/news/mo...
gizmodo.com/aliens-or-not-ther...
Ok this might be a stupid question but, why is It that humans think that all life needs water and certain things. What if life in completely different parts of the universe don't need water because they're a complete different everything. I've always wondered this.
+Joe Trollinsky Because the only kind of life that we can even sort of begin to understand is life which resembles us, or at least some of the other organisms on our planet. Real Xenobiologists are not simply assuming life HAS to resemble us, it's just the best set of patterns they have at the moment, in telling them what to look for. We know what carbon based lifeforms which use water as a solvent do and generally where it can live. so we look for things out in the galaxy which meet those criteria so we can label it a possibility. There is actually work being done to see if life which uses other methods, like silicon based life which uses liquid methane as a solvent could exist, but we're just at the beginning of those sorts of quandaries. We have yet to actually make life from scratch period, which would start with life that resembles us. If we can't do that, we're a looooong ways away from being able to do it for other kinds of organisms which do not resemble us, to even know what sort of conditions we should be looking for. So, we only know how to look for life that would exist in conditions which are similar to what we experience on Earth. We don't know if any other kind of life form is even possible, much less what conditions it would need to live, so we don't know what to look for.
Hope that helps.
Scientists know that possibility exists. if you listen to scientists talk in interviews, they say "Life as we know it" that's because they know it's possible for other forms of life to exist.
The reason scientists search for life as WE know it is because they don't know how to search for other life. We know that if a planet has water and is similar to earth then it could support life like us. So astronomers search there first. if they learned about other forms of life they'd probably search for that as well, but currently, we don't even know what that would look like.
Water is very special. It has a broad temperature range where it's liquid, ice floats (which insulates the oceans, instead of allowing them to freeze solid from the bottom up and never thaw because the ice sinks). It's also chemically special because it bonds and unbonds with a huge variety of other substances, making it extremely useful for life that likes being complicated and energetic. Water is also _extremely_ common in the universe, because it's made from hydrogen and oxygen, the first and fourth most common elements in the universe. Next, water is stable and doesn't break apart easily. But it DOES break apart if you put energy into it, making it incredibly useful for making power storage materials such as sugar (this is what plants do, and it's why they produce oxygen as well as food).
Carbon based lifeforms are a safe assumption because A: We know they exist, and B: It's by far the most stable and yet flexible and energetic basis for organic style molecules (fancy speak for complicated and rearrangeable). Other options like silicon or maybe flourine could work, but only under much more specific circumstances, and they wouldn't be as interesting or stable.
+Joe Trollinsky of course. But it is much easiert to search for life as we know it as it is to look for super strange unexpected things (:
Say you need to find a pencil. Sure, it *could* be inside your computer, but you haven't ever found it there. The only place you have found pencils are in a pencil box, so you look there instead of inside you computer, even though there is a possibility of pencils anywhere.
It's definitely a Halo
Bum bum bah bum bum bah bum bum bah ba dum ba dum dum dum da da da da sag dah dah dah dah bum bum bum...
+Andrew Bulman So THAT'S what Bungie did with all that activision money.
+Andrew Bulman Or like 50 Requiem-like shield worlds. A halo would be far too small to block so much of the star's light.
Also FIVE DAYS WOOOO
+Syntherios
Onyx's actual structure was the size of one AU. Like a "traditional" Dyson sphere. The Forerunner 's could build constructs of multiple sizes.
+Andrew Bulman What? No, its a star
What if... it's not getting dimmer, but it's actually getting brighter?
+tiaxanderson It would also be regular because it is in an orbit
+TrueTydin the stars age suggests it's in the middle of its life, meaning it shouldn't be going through any drastic changes, let alone something the eye can detect in a human lifetime.
+TrueTydin I like the way you think!
+masterofmusic We don't know how old it is... And if you look at the data, it is definitely a transit. The researchers think that it is 1.58 times wider than our sun though. And I did some research and the dimming is caused by something an order of magnitude greater the size of the largest planets and the smallest stars. I don't think its comets, and I don't think its aliens. But I don't have a solid hypothesis of my own. (Really hoping that its aliens!)
+TrueTydin The star has been dimming more and more for over 2 centuries
It's quite presumptious to assume that the civilization that built that Dyson sphere is still active.
There's no reason it couldn't be a defunct structure.
+Ja-Shwa Cardell How would that effect the observation? There's still no IR excess.
Joshua Mcateer Hank said that the Dyson sphere would emit large amounts of infrared, this would only be true if the Dyson sphere were active, if the civilization that had constructed it had collapsed, the Dyson sphere would quite quickly become inert, and would emit no extra IR.
***** Nope. If you lay rocks out in the sun they get hot and emit heat. It doesn't matter if they are rocks, solar panels, or unicorns.
They get hot and emit more ir.
+Ja-Shwa Cardell
He also said asteroids would emit infra-red.
If asteroids or an artifice is orbiting the star then they would be hot in the infra-red spectrum and few others. When they pass in front of the star, 20% of light from all spectrums would be blocked but the object blocking it would be emitting a small amount of IR, making it seem as if only 19 or 18% of the IR was being blocked.
Comets, on the other hand, are very cold, and would not be emitting IR as they are not warm enough.
I'll admit I'm winging the science a bit there, as comets would still glow in some spectrum, so I don't really know. Maybe that's how they plan on determining if it's comets or not.
I personally also seriously hope it's aliens, but It's probably comets or dark matter.
I'm by no means saying it's aliens, but it's my pet theory.
Realistically, it's probably not aliens, but aliens are not impossible.
Way to ruin my day Hank! Damn reasonable, logical answers! ;P
+Finite Atticus Sorry.
Lol
SciShow Space Your reply made up for it. :) Love the content!
+SciShow Space :O Now i wanna get in on this. Uhm, uhhm... pancakes :'D}-< tasty. oh life is grand.
+SciShow Space be a little positive hank... it is probably intelligent life...
I loved the 'thanks' at the end. It's so easy to forget how many people make these videos possible.
You're assuming a civilization advanced enough to build solar energy collecting mega structures would not also be able to reclaim a majority of the "waste heat" by another means.
+d4rk0v3 Nope, just the conservation of energy. They'll have to emit the heat.
+Joshua Mcateer maybe they are able to use energy in the infrared until it is radio durr
We'd have picked it up in the countless radio surveys we conduct. It's currently being investigated now.
It is, however, very unlikely as the efficiency drops each time, and they clearly aren't using much of the energy of the star, as the dips are only ~20% and not much of the total time.
+Joshua Mcateer Just because we don't know of any efficient way to convert heat, does not necessarily mean that there isn't one. We could assume, that any civilisation able to build a partial dyson sphere would know more about physics than we do. Some sort of peltier-effect could turn out to be a good way to recycle heat in space.
So even though we know that they'd have to handle a lot of heat, we don't know if "venting it into space" is the solution they choose.
We're pretty happy with our understanding of thermodynamics.
The total amount of energy can't be changed, all they can do it increase its wavelength. We'd have to be awfully wrong about an awful lot of things for it to be possible.
or a alien "billboard" basically a super thin structure but with alot of surface area, we thought about making one too show aliens that we are here too
+Tobey Plug that's all the planning charts and demolition orders on display at our local planning department, the Galactic Hyperspace Planet Council is clearly informing us that the plans for the development of the outlying regions of the western spiral arm of the galaxy require the building of a hyperspace express route through our star system and, regrettably, our planet is one of those scheduled for demolition.
+Tobey Plug Ayy PBS Space Time
+Borikuaedu3991 i dont watch PBS,where i come from PBS is just local news, they would never cover something like this, i like to read NASA reports and published papers i once read about it in a paper on options to contact aliens, it still must be around somewhere
Tobey Plug Check out their channel, it's great in the sense that isn't too advanced, but covers the right amount of stuff. They did a whole playlist on general relativity and are slowly putting out videos of alternative methods of interstellar travel.
+Borikuaedu3991 channel? on youtube? if not i doubt i could recieve it
Instruction Clear. Successfully found my cat orbiting KIC8462852
+Clear Instruction I want that cat.
+Jordan Shank
It's one fat cat though. Hard to brush
+Gigabic
But when you finally finish brushing it the fur is *so* soft. The claws are still a problem though. As are the random gamma ray bursts.
+Clear Instruction instructions not clear enough. I am now orbiting that cat.
+Devin Pohl Gamma ray bursts? I hope you didn't mean farts... lol
Thank you SciShow
+brenty4110 Thank you!
+SciShow Space No no, thank YOU.
+SciShow Space After one reddit post i was dying to get more info on this. So thanks for the video again.
I've been waiting for this video. Thanks!
Although it is possible that this is because of comets, this too is considered to be extremely unlikely, due to the number of comets that would be necessary to block such a large percentage of the star's light. Although an event involving this many comments could occur, it would be very rare, and it would be a remarkable coincidence that we received the light from this event in the relatively brief period of time that the Kepler space telescope has been operating .
Chemtrails! It has to be chemtrails!
I wonder what the SciShow Space video announcing the discovery of intelligent alien life would be like if it ever happens.
+Leila Smith Honestly, I can't imagine SciShow would ever make a video like that.
+Jordan Shank Even if irrefutable evidence was found or if we had contact with intelligent ET life and it was made clear to the entire world?
+Leila Smith Barring a clear-cut alien meet-and-greet straight from First Contact, I think there will always be skeptics in the scientific community who will doubt any news regarding possible alien activity, and I think SciShow will be right there with them.
Does SciShow have some sort of agenda or is it anti-evidence? Not at all, it's an otherwise stellar learning channel. But it does seem to take a very "status quo" stance on most fringe ideas. Warp drives? We'll never build them! EMDrive? What a load of bullcrap! Alien megastructure? It's most certainly a natural phenomenon. This isn't SciShow's fault, of course -- there's a *reason* why most scientists don't think these ideas hold any water -- but I kinda wish SciShow acknowledged these possibilities being real a bit more.
+Jordan Shank well if a huge ship comes down our skys and red 3m aliens come out if it i dont think there will be mutch skeptics, only deniers
When you hear she might have aliens: hey girl want to Netflix and Kepler
When you hear she might have aliens: do she got a kic
+JJAG3 nerd :)
+JJAG3 ??????
what's her favorite CZcams channel?
Woooooorrld Staaarr!!
kepler and chill*
+JJAG3 she has space crabs...
I like the answer ''we don't know'' best. Without extensive research and most of all patience, we can't, nor should we claim to know what is the causation.
What if they are swarm of comets created by an advanced civilization?
+SaketG I like how you think.
+SaketG Why, would you, what, omg. What are those comets even supposed to DO in the first place?!
+Gabriel Turturea Clearly they are in a space war with another planet which we aren't seeing because we're focusing on the comets and they are so badass that they just straight up attack planets with comets because aliens.
Lol
+mastertucker lol
+SaketG what if the Mega structures are camouflage to look like comets ??
Giorgio Tsoukalos is jizzing his pants over this.
You have no idea how much I've been waiting for this! Each time, the same process goes all over again : Space.com teases me, I wait for a while, do some little research, then wait for SciShow to debunk all the excitement in the air. I believe that what you are doing is critical to the understanding of science. Thanks a lot!
"Just a swarm of comets! on a scale we've NEVER EVER SEEN, EVER BEFORE, YOU KNOW???" would have been the right way of putting it
I want to believe
Was waiting for Sci Show to get on this, wanted a source that I knew I could put a reasonable amount of trust in, instead of the media circus that always comes with these kinds of announcements.
+MiwAuturu I don't. As much as I enjoy SciShow's objectivity and honesty, I sometimes wish they would just come out and say "yeah, it's probably something really interesting" instead of "it's nothing you should get too worked up about". I like sudden, unexpected excitement in my life.
+MiwAuturu You could've just read the 15 page scientific paper that was published... No media there.
3:55 You know Hank is getting all of the ladies with his science talk.
You guys are why I don't bother reading articles titled with stuff like this anymore. They never do their research, and you guys always have the facts.
That's no moon!
how do you know an alien civilization would be emitting a lot of waste heat? any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, right? they may be able to have the technology to not release a lot or any waste of any kind, or a kind that we cant even detect.
I mean, it is a pretty standard rule of physics that used energy ends up as waste heat. No matter how that energy is created we could expect to see lots of heat.
+Timothy Yasi What if their technology was extremely efficient in capturing the energy?
+Flin Dangle
even farts?
CeaoS
advanced alien farts, yes.
+Flin Dangle - the laws of thermodynamics - you can't avoid them unless you break the universe! :)
waited for that one for a while, thanks !
Great unbiased info by the looks of it. Thanks!
I'm not saying Aliens...
But Aliens.
It's obvious... A SIGNAL FROM THE ALIENS!
+Alleczu The1st NO! they're Iluminattis >:D YEAH... OR MAYBE BOTH... :O
IT MAKE SENSE NOW!
+Alejo Tassile Illuminati ancient headquarters
+illuminati senpai I don't know why i read ancient headlamps there, lol
ayy lmao
+Alleczu The1st
So a type of morse code involving dimming the light of an F3-type main sequnce or subgiant star... must be using megastructures...
Maybe it's the debris of planets destroyed in an interplanetary war, or to make way for a hyper-space bypass!The mice were not happy at all!
The everybody saying "hello" was super duper hyper upper cute :P
I'd love for it to be alien but I know its not. comets and what not aren't as fun
and what sucks more is that even if it were aliens, they would have been long gone since the light we're receiving is from I think a billion years ago. y alienz tak 2 lawg 2 kontakt us ;-;
Phill Bill its actually 1500 light years ago
+Phill Bill
since it's kepler, I'm pretty sure the star is only a few thousands years away ...
Phill Bill
we have the technology to travel a few light years in a lifetime ...
you doubt that we won;t *ever* have the technology to travel thousands of light years? .... that's stupid
CeaoS it really isn't. It's like saying in the future we'd be able to create an entire universe. Impossible and irrational. Its just physically impossible. there are just some things that technology will not advance far enough to be able to accomplish.
Please be aliens.
The first thing I thought of when I heard irregular dips in the brightness of a star being attributed to aliens was the main character's final scheme in The Dark Forest, a sci-fi novel by Cixin Liu.
That's no comet clump....
'Damn it we're spotted! Engage cloaking devices!'
THAT'S NO STAR
+BullShitThat It's also no moon!
+Stallion Lol, true.
If aliens were smart enough to harness their stars energy in such a way, is it not possible that they found a way to use the waste heat that was mentioned? Then we could'nt detect it right?
+shutupayourface2 Or its a broken up derelict structure.......
+shutupayourface2 Laws of thermodynamics. Google them.
+Monochromicornicopia So you are saying we know everything?
Icy bubba
Some people's understanding of physics is better than others. I can tell by your comment that you don't understand basic laws of physics.
Monochromicornicopia What I understand is our knowledge of Science is constantly changing.
The scale we're talking is downright enormous, many rods the width of earth and hundreds of times it's length just to hold the sphere in place, then the surface area and the amount of material needed just for that is astronomically huge, can hardly even imagine such an engineering feat.
The mind blowing thing is that all the stuff we are seeing hundreds of thousands of light years away are actually hundreds of thousands of years ago. We are seeing the light that is reaching us from that many light years away. Who knows what these things in space actually look like now.
*ALIENS!!!*
Why isn't it possible or likely that the star is simply unstable, or cyclic in some way?
Stars generally don't do that. There are some unstable stars, but this has no signs of being unstable
+Joshua Pearce Nope... this star is stable, if you look at the data; it is definitely a transit.
+Ryan B Transits occur at regular intervals. The dips in luminosity of this KIC star are *not* at regular intervals. Ergo it is most likely not a transit.
Monochromicornicopia we have only observed 2 massive dips... they were 2 years apart. Therefore we cannot determine if they were regular or not. We will know more in 2017 after the next expected transist. It's not the stars "instability" though. It appears to be very stable. And the dips have many of the same properties as a transist. I am 100% sure something passed infront of the star, or there was a problem with Kepler that went undetected.
Ryan B
He stated specifically in the video that the dips were not occurring at regular intervals.
He waves his hands around like he is performing magic.
0:06 Proof that Hank is really Arnold Schwarzenegger after traveling forwards in time to reach the fountain of youth and back to now confirmed.
The solution is clearly to nuke Mars.
And there i have got an idea! What if the companion star has large planets that are orbiting it? That would explain why the original star gets dim so randomly and also it would explain why it dims so much because those planets would be much further away from dimmed star. Something like when our moon that is riddiculously small gets in between us and our sun and causes it to become dark for few moments. Than the whole irregularity would be caused by the fact that those planets are orbiting a different sun that is also orbiting its larger friend. Eventually it may be found that those random dims are not really random, only their schedule is much longer than we have originally expected.
Not finding infrared radiation is not necessarily a reason to rule out alien structures. A civilization advanced enough to create huge structures could collect energy much more efficiently, without re-emitting the energy that human engineered structures would. Our own human history of engineering has steadily increased the efficiency of energy capture and transmission for the simple reason that it is more cost-effective.
What excite me the most is not only this bizarre star and its not all these different planets discovered so far......what is really interesting and amazing is that Kepler space telescope is only aiming its mirror to no more than 100,000 stars in our own galaxy.....which basically has more than 100 billion stars!! Its like finding diamonds in every cm of your house backyard....can you see the rhythm lol.
If a civilization were to construct a Dyson Bubble or something like it, they could theoretically be using the waste heat to make even more energy. Think about it; not only could you get energy from solar arrays, all that waste heat could be used to turn water into steam and generate some more power. Because why have tons of energy when you can have even more? :)
To be able to block out that much sun this "scarf" has to be really dense. So, would this ring of comet-fragments in any way resemble the Asteroid belts we see in movies - requiring fancy manoevering to get through alive - while in reality chunks in Asteroid belts are miles from each other? Even without alien construction that would be an epic find!
Hard to imagine a swarm of comets that would blot out 22% of that star's light. It's just too damn much.
I'm going to go check it out. Be right back.
Your fun at parties? No aliens... Pffff... Don't mess with my dysonsphere.... :-)
While watching this, I thought, what if aliens with our same level of technology had a telescope pointing at us?
It's possible
The idea of a Dyson sphere is insane, it's probability is not zero, but just imagine building something like that.
"Thanks you.... "... that's make my day, thanks.
I'm amazed at how we think we know everything when chances are we only know what we know.
Thank you Hank for your logic.
You're missing the fact that the odds of us observing the Star RIGHT when the comets that were broken up by the hypothetical passing of the companion star are passing in front of the "HIC" are 'astronomical' (see what I did there).
Welcome to the under-301 club! Please, help yourself to a drink and a front-row seat!
+Cloe Jarozenski meh, it's just not the same since they got rid of the 301 view freeze.
That's not a thing anymore :(
Clear Instruction Collegehumor already made the toaster video.
Clear Instruction
There is no "h"!
I am curious as to why we believe that a civilization, that can capture more of its' star's energy, has to produce excess waste heat? Wouldn't a civilization that advanced be able to convert waste heat energy into usable energy?
Any sufficiently technologically advanced planet that could create a dyson sphere, or even one that can produce a massive solar array that blocks 20 times more light than a planet, probably doesn't need the array by that point.
Thank you.
Seems like this could also be caused by something between us and that star that is not connected with that system at all, but was just randomly in LOS. It will be interesting to see what results from further study.
Paper ain't peer reviewed? Well then, I'd say tell everyone to hold their horses.
"Say thanks guys."
"Hi!"
Well now we know who'll be first to go come cut-backs.
1:17 That's no planet... It's a space station
Nobody explains this things better than you Hank!
I am wondering why it couldn't just be a unique star that has way more unusual sun spots and solar flares than usual?
I also like the idea of a companion star that periodically causes the light blockage in some way.
I heard that it's going through a dip in brightness right now and scientists are excited they get to observe it in real time. (Or at least whatever happened 1,280 years ago.)
I got an idea about the waste heat; aliens could just be turning it into matter via their "matter-trons" that they plug into the incomplete dyson spheres. It will churn out super bricks and stuff for making the sphere complete.
What if it weren't Aliens, but ghosts. Yes, space ghosts. OoOoOoOoOooo... Happy almost Halloween guys.
The irregularity of the dips suggests that they are not artifacts since intelligent beings would most likely put mega-structures into unusually perfect orbits.But I still think Hank is a killjoy.
my understanding of a dyson sphere is that it completely encloses a star which is a massive structure which unless it has massive neon signs saying here we are! it would just blend into the background black of space, since you wouldn't see the star at all. a massive space station or multiple maybe
You would think that a civilization capable of building such massive structures would also find a way to minimize waste heat.
please do a follow up video or post for what the actual reason turns out being (even if its not aliens :( ), since its interesting anyway.
I am part of SETI with the screensaver SETI @Home Program!! You can too!
While it may be very unlikely that this is aliens, it is important to remember that a result like this is more likely if there are aliens than not. So this is an excellent place to look for aliens, being far more likely than at some random star.
Considering what we already learned about large numbers of mini-Neptunes circulating close to their host stars, it's probably the like plus their moons and rings and shepherded asteroids.
Much, much, much better than the Dnews video on that. I guess we're going to pretty soon see Giorgio Tsoukalos (the Aliens guy) presenting Dnews. Congratulations Sci Show to not fall down to that!
John Michael Godier does updates on this star and a few others. He puts out comprehensive videos and doesn't claim that every anomaly is aliens but is hopeful that we might one day discover or contact E.T.s. He also has a number of videos on other subjects and theories having to do with space. Definitely recommend if you like this type of subject matter.
I still find it interesting that they brought up the "A" word to begin with. But, as much as I want to believe, I still appreciate all other likely alternatives. But rest assured, they are out there. No proof, yet no doubt.
facts. that's why scishow is the best
I was waiting for this video, didn't wanna waste time reading any of those other uncritical, click-baity 'science' blogs. Thanks Hank et al.
hair game on point. 10/10 would be jealous again fam
Most people seem to overlook this when talking about stars and intelligent alien life, but the fact that this star is over 1,500 light years away, means that what we are detecting from it now is already 1,500 years old (ie would have happened around the centuries 400-550 AD when the light was first sent away from that star). But even if this was ever confirmed as true, and aliens had been there, 1,500 years between the light leaving the star to it reaching us now is not any evidence at all of aliens existing right NOW, merely that they HAD existed and could well be long dead by now.
Either way, to me, this whole thing is really a moot topic and not something I will think seriously about.
Aaw Hank! You could have given us one more week to be overjoyed or terrified etc. at the possibility... fleeting as it was.
Scientist 1: "Wow, that star got unpredictably dimmer for an unknown reason"Scientist 2: "Obviously it's a super structure used for collecting solar energy by a hyper-advanced alien civilization!"Scientist 1: "Um...what?"William of Occam: *rolls quietly in grave*aaaaand scene
Is it possible that the dips are caused by a superstructure that isn't functional yet? Maybe it's under construction and that's why it isn't producing the heat that we expect?
+Noyes84 It would emit IR radiation no matter what. If it's matter and it's being heated by sunlight, it will warm up and be visible in the IR.
That's why comets are considered the most likely candidate since they are extremely cold to begin with and so will be far less visible to IR telescopes.
I'm pretty sure that the hypothetical superstructure would be producing waste heat in the same way the dust would regardless of whether it's "online" or not. Although, I would think that'd rule out the "comets" hypothesis too, so I'm probably missing something...
EDIT: Dan beat me to it while I was typing...
+Noyes84
Even if it was a simple swarm of big mirrors (not generating electricty locally); no matter what material [known or unknown] they could be made from the elements available in the solar system; some of the energy from the light of the star MUST be dissipated into detectable infrared radiation.
The reason for this is eficiency: a thin mirror can do the same job than a fat, thick one with huge ammounts of frozen water (mimicing a comet); while also being easier to move or keep in place (to prevent "drifting" from the push of the solar wind and light).
Maybe it's just me, but another natural explanation presents itself: the star is being dimmed by a large, but relatively clumpy planetary ring system. The idea is that ring systems can be much larger than any planet could ever get, and the clumpiness would possibly explain the asymmetry in the dimming. Plus, since it's a ring system, it would stay relatively localized within the system, and would be small enough to cause little increase in the system's IR output.
I dunno, this is just armchair hypothesizing. In any case, more study is always best.
The Allen Telescope array is not in San Francisco as you report...nor is the office of SETI. The Allen Telescope Array is WAYYY up in northeast California near Mount Lassen, and the SETI Institute is in Mountain View down in the Silicon Valley near NASA-Ames Research center.
Perhaps it's a large swarm of creatures who live and thrive in space. The chaotic nature of life would explain why the the dips are unpredictable.
hi scishow, i was thinking. could it be an extremely large super jupiter type of a planet? far from it's star enough so that it would be "blocking" the light for a longer period of time taking longer to pass by the star? and because of its extremely large size it would block out enough light to see the large drop of light from the star they were seeing. thank you :D
Or its something closer to us blocking out the light.
You broke the fourth wall!!
Damn, that hits me right in the pride (no pun intended). A Penn State astronomer is the one who suggested aliens. To be honest it's not too far of a stretch, i'm taking a Sci-Fi class right now so... See if you can guess what University i'm enrolled in.
Space dust 2 feet infront of kepler's lens floated by ... mystery solved, i'll take my Nobel prize for astronomy now, kthx
+Boofy I think they already looked into that possibility
They say that a swarm of mega structures for collecting solar energy would put out a ton of waste heat energy, but what if the aliens that put it there are so advanced that the mega structures are so efficient that they don't emit any waste heat, but instead convert it into even more electrical energy?
+burnin8able Basically breaking laws of thermodynamic
Wait, something I always wanted to understand. If the light of a star take light years to appear to us, aren't those stars older than the current version of them we're seeing? If so shouldn't we talk like in the past instead of the present about them?
So many researchers! :P So many scientists!