KIC 8462852 Observations |
KIC 8462852 Observations |
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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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#2
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![]() Member ![]() ![]() ![]() Group: Members Posts: 723 Joined: 13-June 04 Member No.: 82 ![]() |
Attached is a diagram I made using 2-year bins. I followed the same protocol as the author, with RMS <0.33 mag, AFLAGS <9000, and the measured magnitude more than 0.2 mag above the quoted plate limit. For each bin, I have a large dot indicating the average reading within that bin, plus smaller dots at one sigma standard deviation above and below that value.
The high reading for the 1969-1970 bin is due to a single high outlier, and for the 1989-1990 bin is due to two high outliers (there were a lot more measurements in the latter bin than in the earlier bin). If I remove those three outliers, those two bin magnitudes drop significantly, and become consistent with the other post-1962 bins. I also added extra lines, indicating the averages plus one sigma standard deviations for all the measurements from 1890-1899, 1900-1952 and 1962-1989. The first time period from 1890 to 1899 definitely shows greater brightness than in the following 1900-1952 plateau. I have it as a plateau, but it visually looks like the brightness is declining over much of that decade. Visually, the chart seems to show long periods of relatively steady brightness, separated by ~0.1 mag drops in the late 1890s and in the 1950s. |
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