[X] My Assistant

[JRehling]

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.

[dvandorn]

A perfectly aligned stream of cometary bodies (or at least bodies of similar size), that was gravitationally liberated from some star system by a passing star or other massive body, could appear dark from Earth if there is no nearby star to light it up, and could be narrow enough that it would not occult other stars in the nearby starfield. It's the latter constraint, the lack of any abnormal dimming in the nearby starfield, that constrains the option of interstellar occulters more than anything else, but a one-in-a-billion configuration might result in such a stream of small bodies that would only occult the one star. Variations in its density along the stream could result in the odd ups and downs we are seeing -- the stream might be passing between us for some time, but only the densest stretches of it are detectable.

It's just not a very likely explanation, I fear.