A bizarre cosmic object known as “Tabby’s star” exhibits strange dips in brightness, and scientists can’t seem to figure out exactly why.
The star — also known as Boyajian’s star or KIC 8462852 — is located 1,500 light-years from Earth. It has generated quite a bit of intrigue and speculation since 2015, when data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope revealed that the star had an irregular cycle of brightness . In fact, data from 2011 and 2013 showed that the star dimmed by as much as 22 percent for days at a time. “This [dimming] behavior was not something we were looking for or had trained our algorithms to find,” Tabetha Boyajian, an assistant professor of astrophysics at Louisiana State University who led the team that first detected the star’s fluctuations, said in a statement from NASA .
Scientists have tried to explain the star’s weird behavior with hypotheses ranging from swarms of comets to alien megastructures. Here’s a rundown of NASA’s possible explanations.
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