First "SciShow Talk Show" I've watched, and I really enjoyed it! I was super excitedly reading into "tabby's star" when the news first broke. Keep it up Sci Show. Also tell Mrs. Boyajian to do another funding campaign in a year's time, I had no idea she (and the team) crowd sourced for this year, I would have tried to contribute!
Hank Green looks like he would replace Dr. Evil from Austin Powers after he dies. Just the way he sits in that chair and talks gives me an impression of Dr. Evil
Eric Taylor I wasn't bored, I just said I was tired and fell asleep. And I wasn't making fun of him. I think it would be awesome for him to be Dr. Evil. You think being Dr. Evil is insulting but you can't apparently take a joke that obviously and clearly wasn't meant to be insulting
+Eric Taylor I don't think The Entity was judging. This seemed more like an observation with the potential to amuse people. Further I think amusing people is welcome here, since SciShow is edutainment after all. (more on the educational side of the spectrum but still no dry, boring, liveless place)
This was a great interview. I'm also very excited to see what it actually is, and am hoping that this leads to greater discoveries. Right now, my favorite type of star is the magnetar, but Tabby's Star might bump it down the list.
Hank are you coming over to Moscow (ID)? There's a bunch of us (chemistry-type people) going out for birthday celebrations tomorrow and it'd be cool to chat it up a bit!
Okay... Now I wanna brainstorm... Uh... Could it be a dead star orbiting the star? Or a blackhole orbiting a star (okay, even I know that that's not how that goes). Or maybe... Could it be that the star suddenly and for a while uses a fuel to power itself that is not its usual fuel? Like if it mostly burns hydrogen, could the dips be due to the star burning helium for a while? Maybe Two stars with different compositions fused into one big star and its alternatively burning both fuels and therefore changing brightness. Uh... Dark Matter? Oscillating blackhole between Kepler and the star? Huge gas clouds floating in front of the star? Exploded planet? Multiple planet system with many planets gravitationally messing with each other causing the lack of periodicity? Okay, I think I'm not making much sense. I'm merely a biologist; I know nothing of stars.
Okay. 1. Yes. 2. no... it would eat it. 3. no 4. no. it's called dark matter for a reason. 5. again it would eat it. 6. no the sun would eat it 7. no 8 .yes citation needed +100 don't fucking quote me pl0x
Could it be a group of planets or a large planet with large moons? Could it be a planet with moons that happens to orbit with a closer planet that we haven't noticed yet at the same time and when they line up it causes this dip in light?Could it be something that is closer to us lining up with whatever is orbiting Tabby's Star? I just want to know what's going on!
What’s the point of trying to be the first to post a comment, typically saying ‘First’? It usually gets buried beneath a thousand other comments whether they are sorted by ‘Newest first’ or by ‘Top comments.’ The only way to keep it visible is to post a first comment witty enough to get attention and hence the up-votes, rather than just posting ‘First.’
It usually that they are either/both immature and bored to really care about 'true' accomplishment (as people might consider having a 'Top Comment') and instead take enjoyment out of something small, petty and probably imaginary. Or their lives are so sad and small that being first in something really feels like an accomplishment (refer back to 'immature') And also it just being a tireless continuation of a particularly stubborn meme. Then there's the people who do it in 'ironic' mockery. There's not much point in complaining about it either. It doesn't matter.
Fascinating finding. Thank you for sharing. Could the object be large and oblong rotating while orbitting therefore presenting a varied profile at each exposure?
Hey SciShow, I love pondering about space & have a few questions, if you wouldnt mind trying to answer them. 1. How far can we see with the human eye? (for normal 20/20 vision) 2. And what was the universe made out of before the big bang? would it have been a big clump of hydrogen or some "proto-element"? or was it a singularity seeing as all matter was 1 place? 3. Are singularities (black holes) made of sub-atomic particles? (like a neutron star is made of neutrons would black holes be the things that make up the neutrons? (i watched the quark star video & have wondered if a quark star is a stage before becoming a singularity or is the singularity?) Thanx
The dips in the brightness kind of remind me of a cloud going in front of the sun. It happens kind of randomly, and it causes a large dip in the brightness of the sun. Also a cloud would be hard to pick up from a telescope right? I don't know if there is any cosmological event that would act like a cloud though. Any thoughts?
I still don't understand why the idea of redirecting IR excess is not brought up more often. I've even read speculation that it could conceivably be in the best interests of such an artificial array of structures to do so to maintain proper alignment. I watched a lecture by Jason Wright where he states the unlikelihood of this being of an artificial nature because there's no IR excess, but when an audience member brought up this idea of IR redirection, his response was along the lines of 'Well yes, that would explain that'.
So there was another report I heard that suggested the star has been dimming for many decades. ( I know avoid aliens "but") I assume a species capable of building a Dyson sphere would also be know better than to waste and would use the thermal energy. Interesting that it's in the habital region if I heard right.
I've heard sometime ago, a possible explanation about this star having a magnetic field that was "outside of balance" . That way, the magnetic field could change position as the star spins, making it sometimes brighter and other times dimmer, depending on where this magnetic field was. But I tried to google it, and I was unable to find it. So maybe I misunderstood it, or misremembered it, or this's a totally wacky explanation. I have no idea. But at the time it looked like pretty plausible to me. I'm wondering now if this explanation makes sense to someone.
can the star cool down so its darker on one side and then heat up again? maybe because theres some weird stuff in the stars core, or sth nearby that "steals" heat from the star, altho one would be able to see that in IR i guess...
I would suggest people to watch her TED talk first, where you get a quick grasp and how big this discovery is.. And then this video for supplementary comments!
+- xrampagex - I don't think it's that. Its just poor communication skills. Using filler words such as "like" "ummm" and "ahhhh's" are distracting to some. This is especially true in the scientific community. My professor would correct his students all the time on using the world "like". I've watched plenty of videos and lectures online with not a single filler word being used with no cuts or edits. Its not a bad thing. But It is something anyone can work on. Its actually good practice because you will find yourself thinking more about what you say.
Hank, you can't wait until 20 years from now, your child is off to university and the house feels so empty without them? Don't worry, we'll be living in the future by then, with (hopefully) some pretty cool tech and a whole new generation of ingenious and interesting content creators, educators, philanthropists, etc. And we might have even detected alien life by then! Come on, cold bacteria on Europa/Enceladus/Titan, we know you're out there.
Why have Hank in front of the green screen, why not have it replaced by a picture of the lunar surface when talking about space or something like that?
Phil Plait has a wonderful Bad Astronomy article if you want to read more! www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/08/18/astronomer_david_kipping_explains_alien_megastructures.html
Parlyne you could argue that whatever it is soaks up IR radiation. I know it's obvious but it's unknown, so it could appear to obey different laws as well.
Huxmur That's not really how physics works. Any object that absorbs energy will, necessarily, thermalize at least some of it; and, that energy will be radiated back out as blackbody radiation with spectrum determined by the object's temperature. You can't really get around that.
Could it be that the star is revolving around a relatively small black hole? That would be a big celestial object that blocks out light every time the sun passes behind it.
I believe the gravity around this star has weird fluctuations, and there is a Giant planet circling in a weird orbit. I'm going to collect a nobel prize for this because the date of this post is saved and it's all mine. :-)
I like theis a lot! but the switching between the guest speaker and Hank with the green screen background was awkward... I would like this more if I could see both speakers the whole video. Like how the News on TV does it. Just my 2 cents. Love your show!
Someone has probably already asked this but I haven't seen it in the comments yet: How old is the star? Is it possible it is a remnant/remnants of the star's accretion disk? Maybe a planet or two that never formed?
I had a stupid idea how we could help science. I don't know if such thing exists in other countries, but in my country once a year you can spend a small portion of your taxes on anything you like (has to be non profit) - if other countries have something like it - we could combine forces, let people vote for 2/3/4/5 things they want to support (studding tabby's star, cancer research, CERN, ESA, or other projects) and do this together. If this tax thing is a common thing in EU - there's a lot of us, and we can actually do shit. Scientist like Tabetha could actually apply to at least one additional source for funding. But to be honest kickstarter is actually cool too, sadly I did not caught this in time. Need to google if it is possible to donate them additionally.
this star is too old to still have material around it like that. it would be cloudy and far more shrouded than it is being blocked good question though
can you let some of your subscribers help you with the subtitles of the video on your site? the captions are auto-generated english and it's full of errors and i wanna help with fixing it :).
they used to let you do this, I translated an episode into Spanish and did the subs for it.. that's gone now and they posted this on tumblr: Exciting news!You can now translate SciShow videos directly on TH-cam thanks to the site’s new Fan Captions feature.It’s really easy and simple, too. If you’re multilingual and want to help SciShow be accessible to more people, you can go to any video, click the “… More” button above the description, and choose “Transcript.” I assume English transcript works the same way, as they got rid of the site that used to let you do that and it must have been for this reason
there used to be a discussion where Sara Seager talked about what orbiting star shade used for signaling( as opposed to our proposed ones for viewing exoplanets) would look like. As far as i can tell that info is no longer on the net. Definitely an alien conspiracy! #jokingnotjoking
Peter Velzen I think it would need to be substantially bigger than a baseball, but I don't know how to calculate the actual size required. However, the Earth moves in orbit around the sun, so an object between here and Tabby's star would have to keep moving to stay in the way. And something orbiting the sun at Pluto's orbit should move a lot slower in its orbit than the Earth does.
could it be an ice giant composed of something like dry ice or ammonia such that if it were on an eliptical orbit that brought it into the habitable zone which is more than enough to vaporize the ice into a cloud like a comet. because the ice was so cold, when it it warmed and vaporized it doesn't give off a detectable heat signature at this distance
Planetary debris in the habitable zone if a star? OMG, they've discovered Alderaan! Seriously though, could it be something non-luminous (asteroid, etc.) between the star and Earth (closer to earth) partially blotting out the thin stream of photons destined to strike our observatories? So many possibilities...
Truth be told, this is some of the most exciting space news since the Voyagers through our solar system. (Well and a habital planet near Proxima or one of those stars)
Couldn't it just be a type of gravitational lensing? Maybe all were seeing is the influence of something larger nearby causing fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum causing dips in the frequency.
It seems to me like there could be a solar system that is closer, and a big planet is moving in front of the sun the same way that your hand can block out millions of stars in front of your face. If different planets/moons in that solar system also blocked it out, that could account for the different percentages and seemingly random times of lowered brightness.
maybe the structure isn't to harness energy, it could be used to stabilised the star, possibly to prolong its life, there could be a civilisation there that want to keep their home planet safe. why not throw another idea into the mix of lunacy :P
Because at its base matter is energy, in theory we would be able to convert that energy when collected into matter, if fired at a high speed or something similar to the star without totally burning up the fuel being fed to the star you could make it live longer.
It's probably a rogue planet somehwere between the earth and the distant star. I wouldn't expect it to dip 20% again ever. We might be able to verify this by making the computer analyzing kepler's data, search for 5-30% dips, and see if it finds anything. And if this is not lone event, then the answer would most likely be rogue planets. But it would be cool IF it dips 20% again.
A rogue planet could only cause one single dip, since its path could only take it between us and the star once. (Well, strictly, if it were moving slowly enough and were close enough to us, maybe it could happen more than once due to Kepler's motion around the sun. I'd have to check the geometry to see if that's even possible.) And, that "planet" would have to be at least the size of a K-type star to block enough light to account for one of the big dips.
Please let me know if you find out anything :) also. Are you sure the "planet" would have to be that big? detecting objects in space that does not emit radiation is almost impossible, because the only way to detect them is through the gravitational affect it has on other objects. So im thinking. Couldnt it be really close? Because if so, it wouldnt have to be so big. Im just thinking that a small rogue planet seems more plausible than a K-type star one. Please correct me if im wrong.
augustosj If it were much closer, yes, it could be significantly smaller. But, it doesn't really matter, since a rogue planet still couldn't explain the multiple dips of different depth and the overall complex pattern.
i havent looked at the data, ive only seen the part presented in this video. Im not going to continue trying to convince you that it is a rogue planet, because i really dont know all the details and you are probably right. BUT! If it turns out it is, and if you are the one figuring it out, dont forget to include my username in the article you are going to get published about it :D
Waste heat? Couldn't a civilization advanced enough to implement a Dyson Cluster be advanced enough to design it to be efficient enough to not have waste heat? Or am I misunderstanding waste heat?
Let me try to explain waste heat in more detail for you. Think of a car engine, when you use it it puts off a bit of heat and there is no way to reduce this to 0, you'd have to break the laws of physics to do that. Now certainly with better technology you can reduce the waste heat, but typically that better technology means a more advanced society which usually means you have more cars on the road. And so from the point of view of your civilization, your total amount of waste heat has gone up even though each car has become more efficient. This isn't some law of physics or anything, but simply a trend that follows logically from technology advancing. It becomes both more efficient and more widespread, and overall the general trend is that the more advanced you are, the more waste heat you put off even if you are more efficient with it. Another way to think of it is the amount of energy you consume increases directly with how advanced your society is. More advanced societies will consume more energy. So if you use 100 megawatts (MW) per day and are 99% efficient, you have a waste heat of 1 MW. A more advanced society might use 100 Gigawatts (GW) per day and be 99.9% efficient, but they would have a waste heat of 10 MW even though they are more efficient. A society capable of building a mega structure is probably a type 2 civilization, which means you are harnessing energy's that are in the same ballpark as what a star puts off. How efficient would you have to be to reduce the amount of energy coming off a star so low that we couldn't detect it? Now yes it's POSSIBLE for a society to only get more efficient without consuming anymore energy, but everything we've seen in human history says that's not likely.
It would be easier for humans to modify anotomy as to be able to survive with no sun at all. Modify plants as to farm with out a sun. Alas maybe one day we could modify so we don't need to eat anymore, but photosinthesise.
Precisely. If that was the case, I think you could look for the Doppler shift as the black hole gravity pulls the star toward and away from us during the orbit. Red/blue shift should be in sync with the dip. It is testable.
+ErgoCogita that is not true. A black hole could have the same mass as there star or even less mass but it is WAY more dense. After all a black hole is a collapsed star. We know black holes orbit each other I.e gravitational waves. And that Stars orbit each other I.e binaries. Therefore it is entirely possible one of the objects could be a star and the other a black hole.
But the dip in light isn't consistent, an orbiting black hole would be a consistent dip, no? Also, typically in that scenario the Black hole would have an accretion disk, that would be visible no? Even if it didn't, the star being observed would wobble significantly with a partner having the mass of a star, so that would have given it away no?
Cool, so cool, just wish I could live another couple lifetimes to find out what happens in the end (but pref not the Big End of course - don't like the idea of post-apoc)
![Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To See - CTMU [Full Version; Timestamps]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9miVG2xT5jY/mqdefault.jpg)
![Chris Langan - The Interview THEY Didn't Want You To See - CTMU [Full Version; Timestamps]](/img/tr.png)
![เปิดคำทำนาย นอสตราดามุส - บาบา วานก้า ปี 2025 คนทั่วโลกต้องเจออะไรบ้าง? | แฉ 11 ธ.ค. 67 [2/3] |GMM25](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/xmTIKWJUMPM/mqdefault.jpg)
"Relax on Kepler-16b - Where your shadow always has company."
I _love_ the posters.
I think Hank's shirt needs more buttons
Needs a lot more buttons
His buttons need a shirt
I second that.
+
Judging by your profile pic, so do you :P
This was amazing thank you hank for asking all the right questions and the rest of Sci Show
It's awesome to see the face behind "tabby". Thanks for doing this interview!
First "SciShow Talk Show" I've watched, and I really enjoyed it! I was super excitedly reading into "tabby's star" when the news first broke. Keep it up Sci Show. Also tell Mrs. Boyajian to do another funding campaign in a year's time, I had no idea she (and the team) crowd sourced for this year, I would have tried to contribute!
" Nature is a lot more creative then we are "
I really like that sentence
Hank Green looks like he would replace Dr. Evil from Austin Powers after he dies. Just the way he sits in that chair and talks gives me an impression of Dr. Evil
i agree xD
Eric Taylor I was listening, but I couldn't keep my eyes opened and fell asleep. Besides, what's wrong him Hank being Dr. Evil?
+Eric Taylor can you watch my animations?
Eric Taylor I wasn't bored, I just said I was tired and fell asleep. And I wasn't making fun of him. I think it would be awesome for him to be Dr. Evil. You think being Dr. Evil is insulting but you can't apparently take a joke that obviously and clearly wasn't meant to be insulting
+Eric Taylor I don't think The Entity was judging. This seemed more like an observation with the potential to amuse people. Further I think amusing people is welcome here, since SciShow is edutainment after all. (more on the educational side of the spectrum but still no dry, boring, liveless place)
So glad to have the talk show back!
Awesome interview. Thanks
I'm almost positive I watched a Ted talk given by Tabetha. I find all of this so interesting. Thank you both.
Awesome posters!
Super Superb!! Super Superb!! Super Superb!!
Thanks for sharing!
Talking to the Source directly! That's awesome!!
oh! it's spring now! i wonder if the telescope time is working out well?
Really interesting. Thank you SciShow.
That sounds like such a cool job...
This was awesome! Thanks for bringing us lady scientists, and these fascinating science goodies. :)
This was a great interview. I'm also very excited to see what it actually is, and am hoping that this leads to greater discoveries. Right now, my favorite type of star is the magnetar, but Tabby's Star might bump it down the list.
"We're gonna monitor the star every hour for the next 10 years" O.o
Hank are you coming over to Moscow (ID)? There's a bunch of us (chemistry-type people) going out for birthday celebrations tomorrow and it'd be cool to chat it up a bit!
Happy birthday!
Many thanks! :)
Okay... Now I wanna brainstorm... Uh...
Could it be a dead star orbiting the star?
Or a blackhole orbiting a star (okay, even I know that that's not how that goes).
Or maybe... Could it be that the star suddenly and for a while uses a fuel to power itself that is not its usual fuel? Like if it mostly burns hydrogen, could the dips be due to the star burning helium for a while? Maybe Two stars with different compositions fused into one big star and its alternatively burning both fuels and therefore changing brightness.
Uh... Dark Matter?
Oscillating blackhole between Kepler and the star?
Huge gas clouds floating in front of the star?
Exploded planet?
Multiple planet system with many planets gravitationally messing with each other causing the lack of periodicity?
Okay, I think I'm not making much sense. I'm merely a biologist; I know nothing of stars.
Lmao
>Uh... Dark Matter?
literally the entire field of physics
Okay.
1. Yes.
2. no... it would eat it.
3. no
4. no. it's called dark matter for a reason.
5. again it would eat it.
6. no the sun would eat it
7. no
8 .yes
citation needed +100
don't fucking quote me pl0x
Data would be consistent with an orbiting black hole
Could it be a group of planets or a large planet with large moons? Could it be a planet with moons that happens to orbit with a closer planet that we haven't noticed yet at the same time and when they line up it causes this dip in light?Could it be something that is closer to us lining up with whatever is orbiting Tabby's Star? I just want to know what's going on!
Great video guys!
What’s the point of trying to be the first to post a comment, typically saying ‘First’? It usually gets buried beneath a thousand other comments whether they are sorted by ‘Newest first’ or by ‘Top comments.’ The only way to keep it visible is to post a first comment witty enough to get attention and hence the up-votes, rather than just posting ‘First.’
Ikr
it just for fun
there was a time people used to congratulate people who got first.
agreed
It usually that they are either/both immature and bored to really care about 'true' accomplishment (as people might consider having a 'Top Comment') and instead take enjoyment out of something small, petty and probably imaginary. Or their lives are so sad and small that being first in something really feels like an accomplishment (refer back to 'immature')
And also it just being a tireless continuation of a particularly stubborn meme.
Then there's the people who do it in 'ironic' mockery.
There's not much point in complaining about it either. It doesn't matter.
You guys should do a video with Dr. Kiki Sanford. Another awesome science communicator.
Fascinating finding. Thank you for sharing. Could the object be large and oblong rotating while orbitting therefore presenting a varied profile at each exposure?
What about a dimmed white dwarf that has cooled down? or a cooled neutron star that has exhausted it emission of radiation in any form?
16:52, anyone else check there phones?
Lolololo, I grab my phone, and yet I have seen that there no message on the screen.
I WANT HER POSTERS WHERE DO I FIND THEMMMM!?!?!?!?!?!?
www.jpl.nasa.gov/visions-of-the-future/
On NASA JPL's website! If you google nasa exoplanet posters, it should take you there. I have several from the collection and I love them!
JRufu danke
Wow! These posters are awesome.
6EQUJ5! I'm glad people are still looking into this! :D
Very cool of you to talk to Tabetha personally.
T_hank_s
please do one on proxima b!
th-cam.com/video/kbWB_pJrqfs/w-d-xo.html
+Keisha Lewis Thanks to Keisha, scishow finally made that episode on proxima b.
This is a cool idea for a series.
Hey SciShow, I love pondering about space & have a few questions, if you wouldnt mind trying to answer them.
1. How far can we see with the human eye? (for normal 20/20 vision)
2. And what was the universe made out of before the big bang? would it
have been a big clump of hydrogen or some "proto-element"? or was it a
singularity seeing as all matter was 1 place?
3. Are singularities (black holes) made of sub-atomic particles? (like a
neutron star is made of neutrons would black holes be the things that
make up the neutrons? (i watched the quark star video & have wondered if a quark star is a stage before becoming a singularity or is the singularity?)
Thanx
i like the space art behind her!
Great video, I love astronomy! :-)
Hank the chair you are using looks sleek. Also, cool video.
10% funding! I wish our mechanisms were finding that high. I haven't seen that level since prior to the government shutdown!
Cool research!
If i'd get one dollar for every 'you know' in the video, i could just build a spaceship and go there to see whats really going on.
I love Hank trying to not say the word "aliens"
Good talk, good video.
Has the possibility of a connection between this detection and the failure of the telescope been investigated?
It's a fast spinning toroidal star. The dip in light is when the narrowed elliptical side is facing us.
When Dr. Boyajian is now your Astronomy professor and you had no idea how dope she was...
It's a mega death star that uses a black hole as its power source and doesn't radiate heat.
The comment section on this one is tragic.
Was a cool talk. Hope it goes well for Tabetha's group and observations.
=) All the best.
The dips in the brightness kind of remind me of a cloud going in front of the sun. It happens kind of randomly, and it causes a large dip in the brightness of the sun. Also a cloud would be hard to pick up from a telescope right? I don't know if there is any cosmological event that would act like a cloud though. Any thoughts?
+
I still don't understand why the idea of redirecting IR excess is not brought up more often. I've even read speculation that it could conceivably be in the best interests of such an artificial array of structures to do so to maintain proper alignment. I watched a lecture by Jason Wright where he states the unlikelihood of this being of an artificial nature because there's no IR excess, but when an audience member brought up this idea of IR redirection, his response was along the lines of 'Well yes, that would explain that'.
Since the fluctuation is so large, can Hubble be used to get HQ visual data?
So there was another report I heard that suggested the star has been dimming for many decades. ( I know avoid aliens "but") I assume a species capable of building a Dyson sphere would also be know better than to waste and would use the thermal energy. Interesting that it's in the habital region if I heard right.
I've heard sometime ago, a possible explanation about this star having a magnetic field that was "outside of balance" . That way, the magnetic field could change position as the star spins, making it sometimes brighter and other times dimmer, depending on where this magnetic field was.
But I tried to google it, and I was unable to find it. So maybe I misunderstood it, or misremembered it, or this's a totally wacky explanation. I have no idea. But at the time it looked like pretty plausible to me. I'm wondering now if this explanation makes sense to someone.
Key words alien infrastructure, type 2 civilization possibly.
can the star cool down so its darker on one side and then heat up again? maybe because theres some weird stuff in the stars core, or sth nearby that "steals" heat from the star, altho one would be able to see that in IR i guess...
The art style for the planet looks a lot like kurzesagt
I'm sure they've ruled this out already, but in case not: Could it be a local obstruction, as in something in the Solar neighborhood?
I would suggest people to watch her TED talk first, where you get a quick grasp and how big this discovery is.. And then this video for supplementary comments!
Half the video is composed of "aaaa", "umm", "you know". It makes the video hard to follow.
Don't forget about about the word "like".
unscripted speach, view it like your speaking to them.
The problem is you.
Someone is too used to jump cuts...
+- xrampagex - I don't think it's that. Its just poor communication skills. Using filler words such as "like" "ummm" and "ahhhh's" are distracting to some. This is especially true in the scientific community. My professor would correct his students all the time on using the world "like". I've watched plenty of videos and lectures online with not a single filler word being used with no cuts or edits. Its not a bad thing. But It is something anyone can work on. Its actually good practice because you will find yourself thinking more about what you say.
THE JPL NASA POSTERS!!!! YAAYYY!
Hank, you can't wait until 20 years from now, your child is off to university and the house feels so empty without them? Don't worry, we'll be living in the future by then, with (hopefully) some pretty cool tech and a whole new generation of ingenious and interesting content creators, educators, philanthropists, etc. And we might have even detected alien life by then! Come on, cold bacteria on Europa/Enceladus/Titan, we know you're out there.
Why have Hank in front of the green screen, why not have it replaced by a picture of the lunar surface when talking about space or something like that?
Phil Plait has a wonderful Bad Astronomy article if you want to read more! www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/08/18/astronomer_david_kipping_explains_alien_megastructures.html
an unsteady elliptical plane. very complex transit sequences
Could it be destroyed planets that spread out and their debris are what is causing the dips?
death star shooting range
She mentioned that there was no dust, so it probably wasn't a destroyed planet.
Same problem as pretty much every other idea - no excess IR radiation.
Parlyne you could argue that whatever it is soaks up IR radiation. I know it's obvious but it's unknown, so it could appear to obey different laws as well.
Huxmur That's not really how physics works. Any object that absorbs energy will, necessarily, thermalize at least some of it; and, that energy will be radiated back out as blackbody radiation with spectrum determined by the object's temperature. You can't really get around that.
Tabetha has JPL's posters behind her :)
It's like making home video of a small child...they stop doing the cute thing the minute you turn the camera on...
Could it be that the star is revolving around a relatively small black hole? That would be a big celestial object that blocks out light every time the sun passes behind it.
what if the dyson's sphere is insulated on the the no star facing side? so it may not emit radiation
No link to a way to contribute to this effort?
I believe the gravity around this star has weird fluctuations, and there is a Giant planet circling in a weird orbit. I'm going to collect a nobel prize for this because the date of this post is saved and it's all mine. :-)
I have a tabby cat, it sometimes pulsates
I like theis a lot! but the switching between the guest speaker and Hank with the green screen background was awkward... I would like this more if I could see both speakers the whole video. Like how the News on TV does it. Just my 2 cents. Love your show!
Someone has probably already asked this but I haven't seen it in the comments yet: How old is the star? Is it possible it is a remnant/remnants of the star's accretion disk? Maybe a planet or two that never formed?
Any updates? :)
Did I just miss it? What is the name of the star? I don't remember anyone saying it's name (designation)
I had a stupid idea how we could help science. I don't know if such thing exists in other countries, but in my country once a year you can spend a small portion of your taxes on anything you like (has to be non profit) - if other countries have something like it - we could combine forces, let people vote for 2/3/4/5 things they want to support (studding tabby's star, cancer research, CERN, ESA, or other projects) and do this together. If this tax thing is a common thing in EU - there's a lot of us, and we can actually do shit. Scientist like Tabetha could actually apply to at least one additional source for funding.
But to be honest kickstarter is actually cool too, sadly I did not caught this in time. Need to google if it is possible to donate them additionally.
How possible is that this star might be a solar system which just born and it is forming it's planets? Can we identify if is it that the case?
this star is too old to still have material around it like that.
it would be cloudy and far more shrouded than it is being blocked
good question though
Could it be a brown dwarf or a large nebula orbiting the star at a distance?
can you let some of your subscribers help you with the subtitles of the video on your site? the captions are auto-generated english and it's full of errors and i wanna help with fixing it :).
they used to let you do this, I translated an episode into Spanish and did the subs for it.. that's gone now and they posted this on tumblr:
Exciting news!You can now translate SciShow videos directly on TH-cam thanks to the site’s new Fan Captions feature.It’s really easy and simple, too. If you’re multilingual and want to help SciShow be accessible to more people, you can go to any video, click the “… More” button above the description, and choose “Transcript.”
I assume English transcript works the same way, as they got rid of the site that used to let you do that and it must have been for this reason
there used to be a discussion where Sara Seager talked about what orbiting star shade used for signaling( as opposed to our proposed ones for viewing exoplanets) would look like. As far as i can tell that info is no longer on the net. Definitely an alien conspiracy! #jokingnotjoking
How big would a light blocking object have to be if it is not in Orbit around that star but around ou rown sun in stead?
At that distance, something surrounding our sun would be in the way of all the other stars, too.
would a baseball at the distance of pluto do that?
Peter Velzen
I think it would need to be substantially bigger than a baseball, but I don't know how to calculate the actual size required.
However, the Earth moves in orbit around the sun, so an object between here and Tabby's star would have to keep moving to stay in the way. And something orbiting the sun at Pluto's orbit should move a lot slower in its orbit than the Earth does.
salute Tabatha, nice to have a star nick named after you? May you fine the next major scientific discovery.
find*
could it be an ice giant composed of something like dry ice or ammonia such that if it were on an eliptical orbit that brought it into the habitable zone which is more than enough to vaporize the ice into a cloud like a comet. because the ice was so cold, when it it warmed and vaporized it doesn't give off a detectable heat signature at this distance
Planetary debris in the habitable zone if a star? OMG, they've discovered Alderaan!
Seriously though, could it be something non-luminous (asteroid, etc.) between the star and Earth (closer to earth) partially blotting out the thin stream of photons destined to strike our observatories? So many possibilities...
I would happily throw myself at a new Super Earth.
Wow. I haven't seen this many vowels in someone's name!
Truth be told, this is some of the most exciting space news since the Voyagers through our solar system. (Well and a habital planet near Proxima or one of those stars)
Couldn't it just be a type of gravitational lensing? Maybe all were seeing is the influence of something larger nearby causing fluctuations in the electromagnetic spectrum causing dips in the frequency.
It seems to me like there could be a solar system that is closer, and a big planet is moving in front of the sun the same way that your hand can block out millions of stars in front of your face. If different planets/moons in that solar system also blocked it out, that could account for the different percentages and seemingly random times of lowered brightness.
maybe the structure isn't to harness energy, it could be used to stabilised the star, possibly to prolong its life, there could be a civilisation there that want to keep their home planet safe. why not throw another idea into the mix of lunacy :P
How would a structure like that provide the star with enough hydrogen to prolong its life?
lmfao science fail!
Geoffrey Brunell i don't know, possibly recycling energy one way, but thinking outside the usual, is what discovery is all about...
Internet Jotunn science fail?, throwing out an idea is failing? ok then
Because at its base matter is energy, in theory we would be able to convert that energy when collected into matter, if fired at a high speed or something similar to the star without totally burning up the fuel being fed to the star you could make it live longer.
It's probably a rogue planet somehwere between the earth and the distant star. I wouldn't expect it to dip 20% again ever. We might be able to verify this by making the computer analyzing kepler's data, search for 5-30% dips, and see if it finds anything. And if this is not lone event, then the answer would most likely be rogue planets. But it would be cool IF it dips 20% again.
A rogue planet could only cause one single dip, since its path could only take it between us and the star once. (Well, strictly, if it were moving slowly enough and were close enough to us, maybe it could happen more than once due to Kepler's motion around the sun. I'd have to check the geometry to see if that's even possible.) And, that "planet" would have to be at least the size of a K-type star to block enough light to account for one of the big dips.
Please let me know if you find out anything :) also. Are you sure the "planet" would have to be that big? detecting objects in space that does not emit radiation is almost impossible, because the only way to detect them is through the gravitational affect it has on other objects. So im thinking. Couldnt it be really close? Because if so, it wouldnt have to be so big. Im just thinking that a small rogue planet seems more plausible than a K-type star one. Please correct me if im wrong.
augustosj If it were much closer, yes, it could be significantly smaller. But, it doesn't really matter, since a rogue planet still couldn't explain the multiple dips of different depth and the overall complex pattern.
i havent looked at the data, ive only seen the part presented in this video. Im not going to continue trying to convince you that it is a rogue planet, because i really dont know all the details and you are probably right. BUT! If it turns out it is, and if you are the one figuring it out, dont forget to include my username in the article you are going to get published about it :D
Waste heat? Couldn't a civilization advanced enough to implement a Dyson Cluster be advanced enough to design it to be efficient enough to not have waste heat? Or am I misunderstanding waste heat?
Let me try to explain waste heat in more detail for you. Think of a car engine, when you use it it puts off a bit of heat and there is no way to reduce this to 0, you'd have to break the laws of physics to do that. Now certainly with better technology you can reduce the waste heat, but typically that better technology means a more advanced society which usually means you have more cars on the road. And so from the point of view of your civilization, your total amount of waste heat has gone up even though each car has become more efficient. This isn't some law of physics or anything, but simply a trend that follows logically from technology advancing. It becomes both more efficient and more widespread, and overall the general trend is that the more advanced you are, the more waste heat you put off even if you are more efficient with it.
Another way to think of it is the amount of energy you consume increases directly with how advanced your society is. More advanced societies will consume more energy. So if you use 100 megawatts (MW) per day and are 99% efficient, you have a waste heat of 1 MW. A more advanced society might use 100 Gigawatts (GW) per day and be 99.9% efficient, but they would have a waste heat of 10 MW even though they are more efficient. A society capable of building a mega structure is probably a type 2 civilization, which means you are harnessing energy's that are in the same ballpark as what a star puts off. How efficient would you have to be to reduce the amount of energy coming off a star so low that we couldn't detect it?
Now yes it's POSSIBLE for a society to only get more efficient without consuming anymore energy, but everything we've seen in human history says that's not likely.
I want to believe
👽 ayy lmao
My money is on a giant space goat grazing around the star.
Sounds like multiple planets to me, since the dips are different and not periodical.
why radioactivity dangers less to old people?
This isn't SciShow, this is SciSuck!
It would be easier for humans to modify anotomy as to be able to survive with no sun at all. Modify plants as to farm with out a sun. Alas maybe one day we could modify so we don't need to eat anymore, but photosinthesise.
A black hole is orbiting the star
Precisely.
If that was the case, I think you could look for the Doppler shift as the black hole gravity pulls the star toward and away from us during the orbit. Red/blue shift should be in sync with the dip. It is testable.
A black hole does not just orbit a star... lest the black hole be of smaller density than the star.
+ErgoCogita that is not true. A black hole could have the same mass as there star or even less mass but it is WAY more dense. After all a black hole is a collapsed star. We know black holes orbit each other I.e gravitational waves. And that Stars orbit each other I.e binaries. Therefore it is entirely possible one of the objects could be a star and the other a black hole.
But the dip in light isn't consistent, an orbiting black hole would be a consistent dip, no? Also, typically in that scenario the Black hole would have an accretion disk, that would be visible no? Even if it didn't, the star being observed would wobble significantly with a partner having the mass of a star, so that would have given it away no?
I remember doing that
Cool, so cool, just wish I could live another couple lifetimes to find out what happens in the end (but pref not the Big End of course - don't like the idea of post-apoc)
do a video on proxima b!!
Just for you: th-cam.com/video/kbWB_pJrqfs/w-d-xo.html