DENVER, the United States, June 5 (Xinhua) -- The strangest star in the galaxy, KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's Star or Boyajian's Star, remains a mystery. However, the mystery may soon be solved, thanks to the detective work of young astronomers.
Teenagers' new research presented at the 232nd meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in Denver in the U.S. state of Colorado on Tuesday suggests that not only is dust the most likely explanation, but that different types of dust are passing in front of the star.
The team of students from the Thacher School, a private high school in Ojai, California, has been monitoring the brightness of KIC 8462852 for the past year through the observed wavelength of light at the school's newly renovated observatory.
KIC 8462852 is an F-type main-sequence star located in the constellation Cygnus more than 1,400 light-years from Earth. The star has a tendency to dip randomly and erratically throughout the year.
Stars tend to get dim when things like planets or even huge clouds of dust pass in front of them, but that kind of thing usually happens regularly, and only accounts for slight amounts of dimming.
Unusual light fluctuations of the star, including up to a 22-percent dimming in brightness, were discovered by citizen scientists as part of the Planet Hunters project.
Previous observations of the star dating back to the 19th century show that it has been behaving strangely for decades, if not centuries, and could rule out the leading natural explanation.
Several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the star's large irregular changes in brightness as measured by its light curve, but none to date fully explain all aspects of the curve.
A swarm of comets, large clouds of dust and even alien megastructures have been suggested as possible culprits for haphazardly blocking the star's light.
Researchers suggest that the long timescale and short timescale phenomena observed around the star are due to dust that differs in either composition or size distribution.
"Long-term dimming and short-term dimming may be caused by completely independent phenomena happening at the same time," Thacher School senior Yao Yin told reporters at AAS.
Under the supervision of Thacher faculty member Jonathan Swift and as part of a large, international collaboration of professionals and citizen scientists directed by Tabetha Boyajian at Louisiana State University, Yin and Alejandro Wilcox, a student researcher at Thacher, have helped reveal a new insight into the nature of KIC 8462852.
Arizona State University post-doctoral researcher Eva Bodman is part of the collaboration and presented her own findings alongside Yin and Wilcox.
The research could mean that the obscuring material was produced in a fairly recent event in which the dust has not had time to become well mixed. Or the different events could be due to disparate and unrelated phenomena, according to a Thacher School press release.
The young researchers said they will continue to monitor KIC 8462852 to characterize new events and perhaps observe larger events which may trigger, through international collaboration, spectroscopic observations of the obscuring material.
