New Data on Tabby's Star - Just a Dust Bowl?

Ok so I accept that the Elsie dip can be explained by very fine dust, but look at the day 792 dip in the Kepler data. How can dust make a curve that shape? Also, the long term light curve fluctuations are still a mystery. I think Tabby’s Star will continue to perplex us for another decade. Another question is whether there is any periodicity to these dips.

I'm really curious as to the origin of the dust and why it hasn't coalesced into a planetesimal. I read that no excess infrared light/heat was observed, indicating that this likely isn't the result of a cataclysmic event. Would no excess heat also mean that the orbit of the dust in the ring is stable? Could the gravity of a larger planet or brown dwarf prevent the dust from forming larger objects? As for what it would take to convince me of an alien civilization, I'm partial to a message of prime numbers, but that may just be due my love of Jodie Foster in Contact.

Ah noon... When the sun is directly over the North Pole.

Its still not a Natural explanation untill we know were all the dust came from , I imagine it created a lot of dust when the death star blew up Alderaan ;-)

There is another hypothesis. With all the different types of planets we know surrounding many types of stars. Is it to hard to conceive a star surrounded by mega-planets. It is a logical conclusion. "If" the dips are predictable.

It will be very interesting to study the structure of this 'dust' better. I am referring, for example, to the techniques of detecting silicon and carbon in planetary debris in white dwarfs.Or the mathematical relationships between the total dust mass and the gravitational field of the Tabby`s star.

There's so much that would convince that I think we can already draw conclusions. Absence of evidence can absolutely be evidence of absence.

The type of civilisation - expansionist and energy insatiable (like us - the sort evolution usually favours) - would be so easy to spot that I think we can conclude it extremely unlikely. A Kardashev 2-3 civilisation utilising Dyson swarms, would regardless of technology, emit infrared over visible giving a very recognisable type of galaxy. A partially covered galaxy would be instantly recognisable even to a layman. Mega-structures beyond imagining to us but something that a civilisation could easily accomplish in 100 million years if not an order of magnitude less - plenty of time and no sci-fi tech needed. Given the sample size of galaxies we have in the observable universe then that already puts constraints on what can be out there.

What about expansionist, non-energy hungry civilisations? Well, in our galaxy, individual civilisations could have explored our galaxy thousands, if not millions, of times over by now even with existing technology - it really doesn't take that long. Maybe most civilisations aren't inclined to do this, but all of them? It would only take one so we should be seeing evidence of visits to our solar system as recently as 10 million years ago so there should be lots of them. One would expect evidence. When we don't obviously see the very type of life we ourselves expect to become then that points to a Great Filter on the Drake Equation.

Worryingly, if we apply the Principle of Mediocrity, the fact that we are alive within the first few tens of thousands of years of our species (thousands of our civilisation) would suggest that we are not likely to survive as a species for 100 million years. If that were the case, it would be far more likely for you and I to have been born millions of years from now. It is akin to waking up in a cell and seeing your door has the number 6 and discovering the prison has a million individually numbers cells and you randomly landed in 6.

So, with our existing data, I conclude our civilisation is alone (or almost alone) and we're going to die out as a species soon. Happy new year! :-)

Very interesting, thank you for posting.  You have a gift for communicating.  I would add the following observation..., over the months/years I have heard Occam's Razor being stropped and flogged on this topic when it really does not apply.  There are now at least 3 modes of dimming/dipping.  Long term (secular? I thought that word meant 'non-religious?), then there are the shallow short dips of ~1% (Elise et al.) and finally the deep dives on the order of 20 or more %.  

If the reddening holds during a deep dip then we might conclude that the cause is by the same agent as that causing the shallow dips.  If the attenuator appears opaque then we have a different problem to solve.  I think you were hinting at all of this in your presentation.  
I have no idea how any of the new spectroscopy impacts the secular dimming if it does at all.  

Further to your question regarding megastructures, I choose to lean towards them because I enjoy thinking about the consequences of such a finding.  But to convince me personally I am afraid that I would require some narrow bandwidth photons that repeat unambiguously "We are here".  I will accept Primes, Fibbonacci... any series that stands out against the noise and confusion.  But at >1000 ly I doubt we will have the telescope time/power to devote for a long time to come

I love "Cool Worlds"  and look forward to seeing them appear in my notifications.  Very high calibre science talks are good to find.

Great video but your eyes looked like cameras, distracting when you see it.

David, Cool Worlds team and guests,

Thanks for taking the time away from your research to plan and produce this outstanding series of outreach videos.

Your videos are articulate, thoughtful and well planned, resulting in great teaching of complex and exciting ideas.

Please do keep up the great research and the great science communication. Much appreciated!

Regards intelligent life, I'd be fairly convinced I guess by a revelation of certain gasses in an atmosphere which would be very unlikely to occur naturally, CfCs or similar. I've understood this level of analysis might be possible with next gen telescopes.

I got cookies

The easiest explanation is, "we don't know and won't know until our technology allows us to understand". We can hypothesize all we want. We only know what we know. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. Our own existence is roughly 2 million years. Maybe the past two hundred where we have any sort of technological advances. These time frames in our own technological existence are nothing. In just our own galaxy there are infinite possibilities of life.

If extra-terrestrial, "intelligent" life experiences the Cosmos in a manner radically different to our experience, communication might not be possible.

A year behind as I slowly catch up, but wanted to comment. I believe we're being far too restrictive when we look for intelligent life that might look or act as humans. Really what is needed is an environment which is both low in entropy and a system to maintain high energy levels over long periods of time. Life and evolution, as a consequence of the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (Dr. Jeremy England, MIT) requires constant churning. The Earth exhibits this highly dynamic environment because of our Moon (and of course the Sun). So I'd rule out any potential alien signatures if I couldn't discover the source of energy input that allowed it to evolve. Conversely, any highly ordered complex or dynamic system would be worth investigating. Europa's interaction with Jupiter would be a candidate for life in this view (if not intelligent life). To me, Europa satisfies my second criteria, though it's weak on the first. Mars is really dead, energetically speaking. Venus is also a good candidate for life, though it might suffer from being TOO energetic. So anything ordered - which returns me to Tabby's Star. If a natural source of the dust cannot be found, then something must be expending energy to replenish the dust that would be blown away otherwise. Asteroid mining would be the 'alien' explanation.
But while we're on the subject of alien evidence, I'd be curious to hear views on the UAP footage reported on by Washington Post and New York Times a little over a year ago I think?

I really liked the fact the you presented the material as theory and not fact. You also didn't rule out the possibility of a mega structure even though the odds are slimmer than slim. Thank you for your very good video.

It's signaling 11.11geometry .how to build a pyrimd from the inside.👽👽👽

Great work

I'm not saying it's aliens... But it's aliens. ;)

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Well David what it would take is hearing it from you I definitely would not believe something coming from the media. I would want to hear it directly from a scientist