KIC 8462852 Observations |
KIC 8462852 Observations |
Oct 15 2015, 04:45 PM
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#1
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2530 Joined: 20-April 05 Member No.: 321 |
Kepler found one very, very strange case:
http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive...-galaxy/410023/ In a nutshell, while Kepler was observing it, the star (larger and brighter than the Sun) exhibited four dimming events that took place at irregular intervals, blocked a lot more light than a Jupiter-sized planet would block, and had a "shape" that varied in all four cases and did not resemble a planet. This case is attracting some wild speculation… in fact, it is seemingly certain that something wild must be going on; it's just a matter of which wild scenario is the correct one. If I had to throw my hat in the ring, I'd guess that a distant collision and breakup has placed big swarms of matter into a very long-period orbit. But there's no hypothesis that's been offered that doesn't seem problematic. |
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Oct 21 2015, 06:57 PM
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#2
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 98 Joined: 24-November 04 Member No.: 111 |
My concept is that the rings are not edge-on to earth (of course), but tilted as described earlier, as in the Uranus or Pluto-Charon system.
Yes this star would require 3 super-Saturns with the ring planes titled at high angles to the ecliptic. Agreed. Unlikely? Yes. But then we have Uranus and Pluto-Charon. For the sun, 25% of the large planets have a highly inclined orientation. 75% of the large planets have continuous rings. 25% of the large planets have huge opaque rings. Now we get down to likelihood. A SWAG could be made just using the above numbers, but for a starting point, I would need to know the average number of large planets orbiting a star which is observed to have planets (it's in the Kepler data, I just don't know it). I bet the result is rare...maybe 0.1% or something like that. But then of all the thousands of systems Kepler has found, so far we have found just one system like this. |
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