There is a star, unimpressively named KIC 8462852, that sits 1,400 light-years away and seems to be relatively similar to our own sun. But whatever circles that star is so weird and unprecedented that respected scientists concede far-fetched explanations like "alien megastructures" cannot be completely ruled out. A new analysis of observations of the star dating back to the 19th century shows that the weirdness around it has been happening for decades, if not centuries, and could rule out the leading natural explanation.
To date, the most likely scenario seemed to be that a swarm of giant comets might be passing in front of the star, but one veteran astronomer now says the star has also been growing consistently dimmer since at least 1890. That's a completely new level of weirdness that's tough to pin on just comets, especially when combined with the more recent strangeness that first brought the star to our attention.
Bradley E. Schaefer, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University, went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to examine Harvard University's archival photographic plates that include about half a million photographs of the sky on glass plates taken between 1890 and 1989. He found that the light observed from KIC 8462852 consistently and significantly faded over the course of almost a complete century of observations.
"The KIC 8462852 light curve from 1890 to 1989 shows a highly significant secular trend in fading over 100 years, with this being completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star," reads a paper by Schaefer that's been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available in its pre-peer review draft form here. "Such stars should be very stable in brightness, with evolution making for changes only on time scales of many millions of years."
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