Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Alien Rumors (part 2)


The dimming of KIC 8462852 is significant for two reasons. First, other stars have seen drops in light emittance by 1 or 2 percent at most. However, KIC 8462852 has dimmed by up to 20 percent. Secondly, unlike a planet obscuring light from a star at regular intervals because of its orbit, the dimmings occurred randomly during the 1600 days Kepler monitored the star. Near the 800th day of monitoring, the star's light dropped by 15 percent, but near the 1500th day, there was an odd disturbance that caused a drop of 20 percent of the emitted light. A drop that significant would mean the object passing in front of the star would have to be almost half the star's diameter! Considering that KIC 8462852 is 1.5 times larger than our own sun, and that the largest planet in our solar system (Jupiter) is only 1/10th the size of our sun, can you imagine how huge the planet would have to be? Astronomers are concluding that the object could not be a planet.

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