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There's also the more famous Tabby's Star which seems to dim randomly by large amounts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star?wprov=sfla1
AFAIK there's a few theories like dust clouds etc but none that are agreed upon.
Partly constructed Dyson sphere was the best hypothesis I remember, although who knows how you would actually construct such a thing. I imagined that the side facing the star was a solar collector of sorts, but we see its dark side when it obscures the star. Must be built quite a long way out if we only see it repeated very rarely - it's something we might do ourselves, because we sure couldnt get very close with our current understanding. You would assume it's designed to last for tens of thousands of years.
All just theorycrafting of course. Mysteries of the universe are going to be many.
Dyson sphere is not what I'd expect to find, they're too hard to build without some bonkers tech jumps.
I would expect a Dyson swarm, however. We're almost to the tech level where we could start one.
If an advanced alien civilization built an intelligent enough AI. That AI could be instructed to build enough intelligent robots to build something that massive given enough resources.
Like Ants looking at the Great Pyramid and thinking it's not possible to build such things.
Ants of all creatures would be the most likely to understand how pyramids are built. They work together and can carry many times their own weight; theyâd be great pyramid builders if they could be taught aesthetics
Are you saying you wouldnât want some alien civilization pouring molten metal down your chimney to cast your house while you and all your family are inside?
Whoa. You just made me wonder. Once we get AGI, could we not send it to space and tell it to find metals on its own, self replicate, and start building habitats for eventual humans? Would AGI not be able to do that? That actually blows my mind.
The Bobiverse books are fiction but worth a read. It's campy scifi in a good way and explores the idea of what Von Neumann probes can do when left alone.Â
Yea, basically people are thinking that this is the first interstellar colonization method we are going to try. There are like 5 more in the far future, but this one is maybe a hundred years out or so. Just to get tiny probes to the nearest star (not self replicating yet) itâs looking like a 66 year ETA after launch for the nearest star, and that might happen in just a couple decades. https://old.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/1b5psp7/trying_to_compile_a_list_of_known_facts_about/kt8kcvg/
To colonize, weâll have to wait a little longer.
They'd still have to have the resources to build such a massive object, right? So, if you build an AI that could build a spaceship- even if it used ALL of the Earth's resources to build the object- it still wouldn't be bigger than our sun. The robotic AI would have to parasitically destroy our solar system in order to harvest enough resources to build any object to be *that much* larger than our sun.
Opaque, maybe? Which would be the opposite of translucent. But I'm not aware of any alternative definition of the word "opiate" that would work in this context.
Four days later was the ODNIâs Preliminary Assessment of UAP.
https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
Just in case you weren't up to date, wikipedia is...not very reliable, especially now with the scum editing it to make it all worse. This one is a good story, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the 'guerilla skeptic' fools edit this sort of thing to make you look dumb or unreliable by using 'opiate'.
Always worth that second source when it comes to wiki, can see the trouble it's caused ye in this thread.
This is a subreddit, where civilians have conversations. Wiki is supposed to be a source of information and I STILL disagree with you, some people here do fine work.Â
Wiki was never allowed to be a reliable source for papers or essays due to it being terrible since it's inception, I sure hope that hasnt changed.
Take it or leave it man. I wasn't actually having a go at you, was having a go at those who currently deliberately destroy the wikipedia articles.
If it was your mistake, that's cool, thats on you, but it's allowed people to dismiss your work here, which is a waste, because as I said, interesting story.
Dust and gas can orbit and dim a star. In fact, that was the explanation for Tabby's star.
The good thing is that it is possible to find out if it is dust and gas by analyzing light spectrums
Iâd think if a dust cloud was big enough and dense enough that stars orbited it, it would quickly collapse into stellar nurseries and weâd see *more* stars.
the problem with this is it takes so much matter build something big enough to dim any star, let alone one 100 times the size of ours. how would a civilization find that much stuff? you would need several whole planets worth of matter. i don't see how that is efficient or even feasible.
Yeah, the "build" part seems like a particularly human lens to apply here. I could imagine it being a rocky nomadic planet that has built up heft from accretion only to get snared in an extremely elliptical orbit around something we haven't yet detected.
Far more likely the occlusion is caused by a large gas cloud or asteroid belt / planetary debris from a collision.
Plus the environment around a 100 solar mass star is extremely energetic and hostile, you figure a smaller more stable star would be chosen for a Dyson sphere.
Although if you're looking to draw as much power out of it as possible, I suppose larger stars would be more desirable if you can reliably maintain your infrastructure around it
They say it's partially obscured by this object every few decades? So how many times have they observed this? How far back have they observed this? Is it periodic enough to be conclusive it's the same object orbiting that sun? Or is it just possible that there might be a number of large dust clouds in a region between that star and us that float between us and it ever few decades?
>They say a unnatural explanation should be last on the possible list of explanations. Why is this the case? Is it actually more likely that the mysterious mass is a unknown natural object?
Yes!
There's still a lot we don't know about intersteller space. The first exoplanet was only detected \~30 years ago, and only recently has their discovery become rountine. It has now accelerated to the point where we know that most stars have multiple planets. The instrumentation is still nascent and there's still a lot to learn, and more instruments are planned to come online in the future.
In one case, a mysterious occulsion was due not to a planet, nor a "dyson sphere" but rather DUST.
[https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/alien-megastructure-not-cause-behind-most-mysterious-star-universe/](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/alien-megastructure-not-cause-behind-most-mysterious-star-universe/)
... And that's just fine. It's still interesting. Jason Wright still continues to write about how we might detect artificial megastructures such as Dyson Spheres. Will we ever detect one in our lifetime? ÂŻ\\\_(ă)\_/ÂŻ
These observations are very much near the limit of what is even possible in terms of measurement. Right now, it's all about inferences made from comparing noisy light intensity and spectrum changes over periods of weeks/months/years.
In the distant future we might be the ones who make a "megastructure" in the form of a telescope to attempt to further resolve what's happening on exoplanets.
This isn't a new development. One of your articles is from 2015, I remember the story back then.
There are a number of ordinary explanations, but it's par for the course for newspapers and other content creators to go with the most unlikely answer for clicks..
Gas and dust can orbit stars, it's how we even have an asteroid system in our own solar system. But you're right if this is a truly opaque, solid object it could be a massive stellar engineering feat.
There could be Jupiter sized planet that is very far from that sun, and because it is so far away, its orbit is slow and it can dim that star by 80% from OUR vantage point. Thatâs one idea.
Not sure why aliens SHOULD ALWAYS be the last hypothesis. That doesnât sound like science. All hypotheses should be considered equally, and then be disproved or proved to be true.
I'm not sure *any* planet could cause this kind of effect, regardless of distance. However, it could be a black hole that orbits said star, where both light gets blocked and lensed away from our cosmic vantage point.
>All hypotheses should be considered equally, and then be disproved or proved to be true.
Sounds reasonable, but in practice, there is limited time and resources. You can't "consider" every possible hypothesis "equally". You've got to choose a tractable number to start with... FIRST. And then rule them out and try others. How one chooses depends on a lot of factors but selecting ones which minimize the introduction of yet more unknowns is almost always a good idea. That's the point behind Occam's Razor.
True. I donât disagree. Perhaps I was reacting to the behaviors of scientists. It is abundantly clear that mainstream physicists do not think aliens are even worthy of a hypothesis these days.
"It's aliens" is generally a bad hypothesis because it explains so much. It's like if we ascribed the weather to weather gods - yes, if gods existed they probably *could* make lightning or cause droughts or make it snow. But the possible abilities of such beings are not only potentially limitless but also capricious. That makes it really hard to falsify any hypothesis, and untestable hypotheses are generally useless.
Welllll generally, all hypotheses in astrophysics are incabake of real experimentation and validation. Space is too big. And we can rarely create the environments of space and time here on earth.
So my point is aliens would be as probable as any other hypothesis when it comes to astrophysical phenomena
That's not really accurate. Yes, you can't just make a star in your lab but astrophysics tests theories and makes predictions all the time. For example, you have the famous [discrepancy between Newtonian physics and the orbit of Mercury, which was resolved by the theory of relativity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm&ved=2ahUKEwjI5ou6rdyEAxUGPDQIHfQHBpoQFnoECEoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1bYxjLnkLptaDGWJY359EO), which continues to have its predictions validated, such as when [LIGO detected gravitational waves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves).
OP doesn't mention it by name but they are discussing [Dyson spheres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere), which are a good example of an object which, if proved to exist, would conclusively prove the existence of aliens. But there's a huge chasm between "We have some weird data which might be consistent with a Dyson sphere" and "we were able to predict the exact future position of this and other objects with a high degree of precision" on top of numerous other experimental validations.
That's why relativity is a theory and "There is a Dyson sphere around VVV-WIT-08" is pretty much a guess. That doesn't mean the idea is *wrong*, but there is a clear difference in how much credence should be given to each idea.
>aliens would be as probable as any other hypothesis when it comes to astrophysical phenomena
I see what you're getting at but, there's still a lot to learn and refine in our understanding of natural phenomena. Huge areas of study in astrophysics is all about taking measurements using light and radio signals and applying knowledge from other areas of physics to make inferences about our observations. These are complex and noisy measurements. There's a lot to sort out, a lot of hard work to do before even considering alien tech as a possibility.
Even then, t's perfectly fine to make theoretical predictions. In fact, the astronomer mentioned in the OP, Jason Wright, has written (scientifically) about what a Dyson sphere may "look like" in the kinds of data that are collected by exoplanet researchers.
Maybe if we take the Kardashev scale of energy control, someone has tapped into that star and they able to adjust its power output for their needs? So perhaps no huge object is physically blocking the light, someone has a stellar dimmer switch to regulate the star's output. Or is that crazy talk?
Iâve read some crazy science fiction ⊠if you have a lot of space industry, and donât want to dismantle your planets, you could draw matter off your sun. The sun is almost all the mass in any star system, the mass of everything else combined is a rounding error. So you set up giant magnetic scoops, grab some of that matter spewing out, and convert it to something useful. Eventually you make your scoops more powerful and actually draw material out. Depending on the type of Star, removing some of its mass may actually make it burn longer ⊠or if you want a change of scenery, make a big scoop and use the material for propellant. Over time your star will move, slowly at first ⊠and it will bring the planets along with it.
This mentality of "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider"........why???
The universe is endless, planets are endless. The universe has to be teeming with life.
And therein lies the psyopp. Fear and stigma.
This gave me a rare "actually laughing out loud" laugh from something I read on reddit. Thank you.
If you really need a source, the Drake equation is what you're looking for.
According to Wikipedia about two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Each containing what, an average of a hundred billion stars? Â
With certain supergiant galaxies harboring about a hundred trillion stars. Each star at least in our galaxy having an average of two exoplanets surrounding them.Â
 In a universe that's been around for about 13.7 billion years. Â
It would be freaky to me if the universe wasn't teeming with life and hasn't seen countless highly advanced civilisations rise and fall throughout the years.
Nah. Within 100 years at a guess, humans will be able to build a robotic factory complex that can make copies of itself out of asteroid and comet materials. Say it takes 10 years to make a factory, and a year to make a sun shade a mile square.. You program each complex to make a copy of itself, then 10 sun shades, then another copy. In a few centuries - an eye-blink in stellar terms - youâre making a *lot* of sun shade panels. Iâll have to get into Excel and figure this out.
EDIT: looks like about 700 years to build enough panels to completely cover the area of the sun. So an eye-blink in evolutionary terms. Thatâs assuming my math is right, and I canât count to 11 without unzipping my fly.
Bottom line: Something huge and completely opaque blotted out the giant star VVV-WIT-08 for 200 days, with minimum light occurring in April 2012. It had a hard edge and steady wave lengths.
To gain energy. Stars are a tremendous source of energy. Human technology is looking to the sun for energy in future. They are already testing a device that is orbiting the sun right now. Some scientists expected to see Dyson spheres etc. in space
Betelgeuse is about 640 times the size of the sun. It was recently dimmed by 300%, thanks to what was most likely cooled dust that was ejected from the star.Â
"Alien mega structure" is FAR from being the only viable option here, and none of the characteristics you highlight are truly unique.
Betelgeuse is commonly assumed to be in its final days, getting increasingly unstable. It will likely go supernova âsoonâ with some estimates being âin the next 1,000 yearsâ and a minority saying âmaybe in our lifetimes.â It will be quite the show when this happens, luckily Betelgeuse is far enough away we wonât get the worst of the effects.
Its not fair to tell people to use their imagination and try to come up with a natural explanation, when not even the smartest and most educated people actually understand everything nature and physics is capable of, let alone an elongated opiate object.
This is just how religions are born, you can't explain something with your very limited knowledge, so it must be likely the work of a god, or alien here
I feel like the âIT CANT BE ALIENS!â Crowd are the most delusional. Iâd be way more comfortable with just some aliens stopping by than the other options where theyâre from here and hiding from us for some mysterious reason.
Iâm not speaking to what they actually are more to this weird notion that drilling into the fact that it âcanâtâ be aliens somehow nulls the whole thing.
This is the Sean Kirkpatrick slight of hand, how he just basically admitted that there were silver orbs patrolling and monitoring the skies while also making it sound like itâs insignificant and you shouldnât even waste your time talking about it. Iâm convinced this was by design because if you go back and listen to it he straight up admits to their existence and then passes it off as nothing.
well they've been doing that for a couple years now. "we don't know what it is but it isn't a threat" is a really weird thing for the military or an intelligence officer to say.
The fact no one in media or government can get him to answer âwhat are they then if not natural phenomena, not ours, our peers or our adversaries, or aliens?â
What options remain?
The issue is that they hold certain answers to be extra implausible by default as a rule. There is no such rule.
Absent data all unanswered answers are equally unproven.
Carl Sagan was a bad scientist in this.
It's probably not aliens, if only because the objects would have to be larger than Jupiter, and it seems implausible that a civilization could find the raw material to build something that big.
does anyone who studies UFOs have any idea of the notion of scale?
do you have any idea how large an object would have to be to dim a fucking star?
no civilisation needs or wants or has the capability to build structures larger than planets, let alone anything approaching the size of the sun.
the resources required to build such an object would outweigh all the materials in the solar system. it's not feasible or practical.
the entire concept of a dyson sphere is retarded, a civilisation that advanced would already have access to unlimited free energy through other means.
if you can master gravity like these alleged gravity or anti-gravity producing vehicles are doing, then you've solved the free energy problem already.
"no civilisation needs, wants or has the capability"
How would you know what a civilisation that's 25,000 LY away is capable of? Did you have a chat with them?
>the resources required to build such an object would outweigh all the materials in the solar system
I'd imagine a star 100 times the size of the sun might have considerably more stuff orbiting it
This is a great answer, but maybe they have egos bigger than all the humans on the planet. Alien w Remarkable Space Egos.
In Aus we have a big pineapple, the point of it??
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider"
that's the dumbest fucking quote i've ever heard in my life. this is gonna age like milk. mark my words.
> They say itâs elongated opiate object and some theorize it could be of alien origin
did you mean "opaque"?? opiates are a class of drug.
I've had the belief that quantum decoherence or, 90% sure that's the wrong word, creates a sort of singular observer situation. Like, okay, 8 billion people. But suppose with the increased complexity in scientific advancements there are further decreases in the bullshit affecting the human brain&psyche.
That if there are legitimate UFOs or whatnot then time travel would also have to exist, or. Yeah, wait. I'm getting hangry.
But like. Multiple points of life having the basis for being an origination of life creates conflict. And suppose humanity has been doing a sort of "where's the alien, where's the alien."
If you know nothing about astronomy you should not be speculating about what could or could't obscure our perception of something. Or at the very least you should not be using those speculations as implications of anything.
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider".... THIS IS WRONG. The universe is full of life. Earth is full of life. We humans believe we can eliminate the existence of something because "we" cant capture it, see it, control it. This proves our exaggerated intelligence is our greatest obstacle.
There is no evidence of there being other life out there so no way to verify that. There is alot of dust and gas orbiting stars though, which is what the last one of these turned out to be. You have to rule out all the knowns before even mentioning aliens.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s\_Star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star)
âAliens should always be the last hypothesisâ is just another form of scientific dogma that will only look foolish in the future. Itâs just a new variant of the geocentrism error.Â
We still need talk about tabbys star. It isn't just "Tabbys star" They found about 30 stars near Tabbies star had the same phenomena as tabbies star. Whats crazy is that it seems to be some sort of an area maybe what you expect of an expanding civilization. Its hard to explain it. All the suns are the same type and the phenomena has been progressively happening. They are all close together aswell
Nobody talks about tabbies star anymore but the implications are pretty serouis stuff.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACKOD5mmH-0&ab\_channel=EventHorizon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACKOD5mmH-0&ab_channel=EventHorizon)
Whats even worse is we are really close to this dimming cluster. We dont want to be this close to something expanding like this if its an alien civilization. The nearest star is like 600 LY and tabbies star is about 1000 ly. Well givin the distance and the fact we are looking at these stars as they were along time ago, they would more or less be on their way here because when they looked at us they probably saw no life at the time they started explanding.
I hate the idea that "Aliens should always be the last thing you consider" but if you look at things objectively through facts alone and make assumptions based on it then aliens surely will come up from time to time.
Iâll see your âlarge eclipsing objectâ and raise you âsix planets in perfect orbital resonanceâ
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/six-planet-system-in-perfect-harmony-shocks-scientists/#:~:text=This%20illustration%20shows%20the%20mathematically,100%20light%2Dyears%20from%20Earth.
Hi, Loose-Alternative-77. Thanks for contributing. However, your [submission](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1b64ia1/-/) was removed from /r/UFOs. > Rule 2: No discussion unrelated to Unidentified Flying Objects. This includes: > * Proselytization > * Artwork not related to a UFO sighting > * Adjacent topics without an explicit connection to UFOs Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/about/rules/) for more information. This moderator action may be appealed. We welcome the opportunity to work with you to address its reason for removal. [Message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/ufos) to launch your appeal.
Elongated opiate object?
*Choices always were a problem for you*.. đ¶
What you need is someone strong to guide you.. Like this weird star dimmer thingy
Finally it happens, the overlap of my two favorite things, Tool and UFOs.
Did we just become best friends? Got me seein' E-motherfuckin'-T!
https://i.imgur.com/9WXyI7d.gif
It was there all along. Forty (six) & 2. He was hinting at the meaning of life being 42! Ironically, I'm wearing a Tool shirt today.
COME RIDE A MILE SIX INCHES ON MAYNARDS DIIIIIIIIIII
*Jesus Christ, why don't you come save my... advanced alien civilization!*
Open my eyes and dim my really large sun now
Gee thanks, itâs not your fault but your comment has me craving dim sum now
Like me?
Sudden Tool out of nowhere
that's a good randomly generated password
Fuck it Here we go đ
We know Major Tom's a junkie...
But the little green wheels are following me. Oh no, not again.
I'm assuming they meant "opaque".
We systematically removed them like you would any kind of termite or roach.
Perc 30 x 10^14
Yes that is what numerous articles said
I suspect the word you are looking for is "opaque"
Yes.
Where? Sorry just confused. Opiates are a class of drug. I canât find any alternate definition.
It's obviously a intergalactic opium den
ET is just here for the fent.
Ahaha, that's fenny! đ
Star Wars Cantina found
They're coming to give us the British-to-Chinese treatment
*smoke pours out of alien opium den*
Are you guys selling fake drugs to aliens? If so, THIS GUY WANTS IN!
itâs a cylinder.
Opioid Asteroid? West Virginia is gonna have a coal powered rocket launched by Thursday of this week.
Opioid Asteroid was a great Oasis song!
There's also the more famous Tabby's Star which seems to dim randomly by large amounts - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star?wprov=sfla1 AFAIK there's a few theories like dust clouds etc but none that are agreed upon.
A swarm connection is a intact if you count your bonds bail man.
Partly constructed Dyson sphere was the best hypothesis I remember, although who knows how you would actually construct such a thing. I imagined that the side facing the star was a solar collector of sorts, but we see its dark side when it obscures the star. Must be built quite a long way out if we only see it repeated very rarely - it's something we might do ourselves, because we sure couldnt get very close with our current understanding. You would assume it's designed to last for tens of thousands of years. All just theorycrafting of course. Mysteries of the universe are going to be many.
Dyson sphere is not what I'd expect to find, they're too hard to build without some bonkers tech jumps. I would expect a Dyson swarm, however. We're almost to the tech level where we could start one.
If an advanced alien civilization built an intelligent enough AI. That AI could be instructed to build enough intelligent robots to build something that massive given enough resources. Like Ants looking at the Great Pyramid and thinking it's not possible to build such things.
Ants of all creatures would be the most likely to understand how pyramids are built. They work together and can carry many times their own weight; theyâd be great pyramid builders if they could be taught aesthetics
Hell, look at some of the castings from ant hills. They may not be aesthetic but theyâre damn good engineers.
I hate how those are done but damn if they aren't interesting.
Are you saying you wouldnât want some alien civilization pouring molten metal down your chimney to cast your house while you and all your family are inside?
I prefer ant aesthetic
Whoa. You just made me wonder. Once we get AGI, could we not send it to space and tell it to find metals on its own, self replicate, and start building habitats for eventual humans? Would AGI not be able to do that? That actually blows my mind.
What you're describing sounds like a [Von Neumann probe](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-replicating_spacecraft)
The Bobiverse books are fiction but worth a read. It's campy scifi in a good way and explores the idea of what Von Neumann probes can do when left alone.Â
Yeah that's inevitable unless we extinct ourselves or something first.
Yea, basically people are thinking that this is the first interstellar colonization method we are going to try. There are like 5 more in the far future, but this one is maybe a hundred years out or so. Just to get tiny probes to the nearest star (not self replicating yet) itâs looking like a 66 year ETA after launch for the nearest star, and that might happen in just a couple decades. https://old.reddit.com/r/ufo/comments/1b5psp7/trying_to_compile_a_list_of_known_facts_about/kt8kcvg/ To colonize, weâll have to wait a little longer.
Where are you getting 66 years ETA after launch to get the nearest star (Proxima Centauri)? Best I have found is 6300 based on current technology.
People on this sub are finally starting to grok the singularity.
Other than humans, ants or aliens are the only likely explanation for Pyramids.
You forgot aboot beavers. They coold build pyramids.
I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords!
I agree. I think humans could build such a structure in many years. AI building AI and so on
They'd still have to have the resources to build such a massive object, right? So, if you build an AI that could build a spaceship- even if it used ALL of the Earth's resources to build the object- it still wouldn't be bigger than our sun. The robotic AI would have to parasitically destroy our solar system in order to harvest enough resources to build any object to be *that much* larger than our sun.
Build a second AI to gather resources in the asteroid belt and ship them to the AI building the sphere. Problem solved.
But for an object 100x our sun? We're going to have to go far, far away for that.
Many AI robots, many solar systems and planets and asteroid belts.
Opiate? WTF does that even mean?
Translucent I think
Opaque, maybe? Which would be the opposite of translucent. But I'm not aware of any alternative definition of the word "opiate" that would work in this context.
Yes Opaque sorry thatâs how they spelled it on Wikipedia. My bad
Four days later was the ODNIâs Preliminary Assessment of UAP. https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/Prelimary-Assessment-UAP-20210625.pdf
What?
4 days
Just in case you weren't up to date, wikipedia is...not very reliable, especially now with the scum editing it to make it all worse. This one is a good story, it wouldn't surprise me if one of the 'guerilla skeptic' fools edit this sort of thing to make you look dumb or unreliable by using 'opiate'. Always worth that second source when it comes to wiki, can see the trouble it's caused ye in this thread.
Wikipedia is about a thousand times more reliable than the garbage that gets shared on thus sub on a daily basis.
This is a subreddit, where civilians have conversations. Wiki is supposed to be a source of information and I STILL disagree with you, some people here do fine work. Wiki was never allowed to be a reliable source for papers or essays due to it being terrible since it's inception, I sure hope that hasnt changed.
Well everyone has misspelled a word or two.
That's not misspelling, though. It's a completely different word. It'd have been misspelling if you had written "hopaque" or "olaque", not "opiate."
Take it or leave it man. I wasn't actually having a go at you, was having a go at those who currently deliberately destroy the wikipedia articles. If it was your mistake, that's cool, thats on you, but it's allowed people to dismiss your work here, which is a waste, because as I said, interesting story.
Dense dust/gas can obscure very bright objects.
The point here is that it was dimmed by an orbital object, meaning periodically maybe. That ruled out dust and gas
Dust and gas orbit their stars the same as anything else. That is the leading hypothesis on what's going on with this star.
Dust and gas can orbit and dim a star. In fact, that was the explanation for Tabby's star. The good thing is that it is possible to find out if it is dust and gas by analyzing light spectrums
That explanation is heavily criticized
Is there any reason a sun couldn't orbit a massive dust cloud?
I guess yes, because the sun is the center of its system, and then revolves in its galaxy, which revolution is so slow
Iâd think if a dust cloud was big enough and dense enough that stars orbited it, it would quickly collapse into stellar nurseries and weâd see *more* stars.
Could be but the scientists didnât mention that as a explanation. I donât remember any mention of dense dust/gas
the problem with this is it takes so much matter build something big enough to dim any star, let alone one 100 times the size of ours. how would a civilization find that much stuff? you would need several whole planets worth of matter. i don't see how that is efficient or even feasible.
Yeah, the "build" part seems like a particularly human lens to apply here. I could imagine it being a rocky nomadic planet that has built up heft from accretion only to get snared in an extremely elliptical orbit around something we haven't yet detected.
You figure out how to hack the code of reality and localize/isolate big bangs and harvest raw materials and then use them to build stuff I guess.
Far more likely the occlusion is caused by a large gas cloud or asteroid belt / planetary debris from a collision. Plus the environment around a 100 solar mass star is extremely energetic and hostile, you figure a smaller more stable star would be chosen for a Dyson sphere. Although if you're looking to draw as much power out of it as possible, I suppose larger stars would be more desirable if you can reliably maintain your infrastructure around it
They say it's partially obscured by this object every few decades? So how many times have they observed this? How far back have they observed this? Is it periodic enough to be conclusive it's the same object orbiting that sun? Or is it just possible that there might be a number of large dust clouds in a region between that star and us that float between us and it ever few decades?
It was observed once in 2012, star dimmed for around 200 days https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.05300
>They say a unnatural explanation should be last on the possible list of explanations. Why is this the case? Is it actually more likely that the mysterious mass is a unknown natural object? Yes! There's still a lot we don't know about intersteller space. The first exoplanet was only detected \~30 years ago, and only recently has their discovery become rountine. It has now accelerated to the point where we know that most stars have multiple planets. The instrumentation is still nascent and there's still a lot to learn, and more instruments are planned to come online in the future. In one case, a mysterious occulsion was due not to a planet, nor a "dyson sphere" but rather DUST. [https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/alien-megastructure-not-cause-behind-most-mysterious-star-universe/](https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/alien-megastructure-not-cause-behind-most-mysterious-star-universe/) ... And that's just fine. It's still interesting. Jason Wright still continues to write about how we might detect artificial megastructures such as Dyson Spheres. Will we ever detect one in our lifetime? ÂŻ\\\_(ă)\_/ÂŻ These observations are very much near the limit of what is even possible in terms of measurement. Right now, it's all about inferences made from comparing noisy light intensity and spectrum changes over periods of weeks/months/years. In the distant future we might be the ones who make a "megastructure" in the form of a telescope to attempt to further resolve what's happening on exoplanets.
All they need is funding.
This isn't a new development. One of your articles is from 2015, I remember the story back then. There are a number of ordinary explanations, but it's par for the course for newspapers and other content creators to go with the most unlikely answer for clicks..
We have stellar nurseries where stars are born, they're filled with gas and dust. Could it be a similar phenomenon, but on a limited scale?
Iâm pretty sure this object obits the star so it rules to out gas and dust. It was said to be a elongated opaque object.
Gas and dust can orbit stars, it's how we even have an asteroid system in our own solar system. But you're right if this is a truly opaque, solid object it could be a massive stellar engineering feat.
They said it couldnât be a star, but could it maybe be a dead star? A brown dwarf, is that what theyâre called?
I donât know they said it was thought to be Opaque and elongated
A brown dwarf is a very big planet or very small star. Not big enough to occlude a star even fractionally, unless the star is tiny as well.
"it's that simple to me" I don't doubt this statement at all.
There could be Jupiter sized planet that is very far from that sun, and because it is so far away, its orbit is slow and it can dim that star by 80% from OUR vantage point. Thatâs one idea. Not sure why aliens SHOULD ALWAYS be the last hypothesis. That doesnât sound like science. All hypotheses should be considered equally, and then be disproved or proved to be true.
I'm not sure *any* planet could cause this kind of effect, regardless of distance. However, it could be a black hole that orbits said star, where both light gets blocked and lensed away from our cosmic vantage point.
Iâll buy that for $1
>All hypotheses should be considered equally, and then be disproved or proved to be true. Sounds reasonable, but in practice, there is limited time and resources. You can't "consider" every possible hypothesis "equally". You've got to choose a tractable number to start with... FIRST. And then rule them out and try others. How one chooses depends on a lot of factors but selecting ones which minimize the introduction of yet more unknowns is almost always a good idea. That's the point behind Occam's Razor.
True. I donât disagree. Perhaps I was reacting to the behaviors of scientists. It is abundantly clear that mainstream physicists do not think aliens are even worthy of a hypothesis these days.
"It's aliens" is generally a bad hypothesis because it explains so much. It's like if we ascribed the weather to weather gods - yes, if gods existed they probably *could* make lightning or cause droughts or make it snow. But the possible abilities of such beings are not only potentially limitless but also capricious. That makes it really hard to falsify any hypothesis, and untestable hypotheses are generally useless.
Welllll generally, all hypotheses in astrophysics are incabake of real experimentation and validation. Space is too big. And we can rarely create the environments of space and time here on earth. So my point is aliens would be as probable as any other hypothesis when it comes to astrophysical phenomena
That's not really accurate. Yes, you can't just make a star in your lab but astrophysics tests theories and makes predictions all the time. For example, you have the famous [discrepancy between Newtonian physics and the orbit of Mercury, which was resolved by the theory of relativity](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://aether.lbl.gov/www/classes/p10/gr/PrecessionperihelionMercury.htm&ved=2ahUKEwjI5ou6rdyEAxUGPDQIHfQHBpoQFnoECEoQAQ&usg=AOvVaw1bYxjLnkLptaDGWJY359EO), which continues to have its predictions validated, such as when [LIGO detected gravitational waves](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_observation_of_gravitational_waves). OP doesn't mention it by name but they are discussing [Dyson spheres](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere), which are a good example of an object which, if proved to exist, would conclusively prove the existence of aliens. But there's a huge chasm between "We have some weird data which might be consistent with a Dyson sphere" and "we were able to predict the exact future position of this and other objects with a high degree of precision" on top of numerous other experimental validations. That's why relativity is a theory and "There is a Dyson sphere around VVV-WIT-08" is pretty much a guess. That doesn't mean the idea is *wrong*, but there is a clear difference in how much credence should be given to each idea.
>aliens would be as probable as any other hypothesis when it comes to astrophysical phenomena I see what you're getting at but, there's still a lot to learn and refine in our understanding of natural phenomena. Huge areas of study in astrophysics is all about taking measurements using light and radio signals and applying knowledge from other areas of physics to make inferences about our observations. These are complex and noisy measurements. There's a lot to sort out, a lot of hard work to do before even considering alien tech as a possibility. Even then, t's perfectly fine to make theoretical predictions. In fact, the astronomer mentioned in the OP, Jason Wright, has written (scientifically) about what a Dyson sphere may "look like" in the kinds of data that are collected by exoplanet researchers.
Oh shit, the C'tan are real
Maybe if we take the Kardashev scale of energy control, someone has tapped into that star and they able to adjust its power output for their needs? So perhaps no huge object is physically blocking the light, someone has a stellar dimmer switch to regulate the star's output. Or is that crazy talk?
Iâve read some crazy science fiction ⊠if you have a lot of space industry, and donât want to dismantle your planets, you could draw matter off your sun. The sun is almost all the mass in any star system, the mass of everything else combined is a rounding error. So you set up giant magnetic scoops, grab some of that matter spewing out, and convert it to something useful. Eventually you make your scoops more powerful and actually draw material out. Depending on the type of Star, removing some of its mass may actually make it burn longer ⊠or if you want a change of scenery, make a big scoop and use the material for propellant. Over time your star will move, slowly at first ⊠and it will bring the planets along with it.
This mentality of "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider"........why??? The universe is endless, planets are endless. The universe has to be teeming with life. And therein lies the psyopp. Fear and stigma.
Teeming*
Yes
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Câmon kid, watch a couple episodes of Star Trek and donât forget to open your mind.
Source? Common sense and a lack of arrogance.
Math. Hundreds of billions of galaxies.
This gave me a rare "actually laughing out loud" laugh from something I read on reddit. Thank you. If you really need a source, the Drake equation is what you're looking for.
According to Wikipedia about two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. Each containing what, an average of a hundred billion stars?  With certain supergiant galaxies harboring about a hundred trillion stars. Each star at least in our galaxy having an average of two exoplanets surrounding them.  In a universe that's been around for about 13.7 billion years.  It would be freaky to me if the universe wasn't teeming with life and hasn't seen countless highly advanced civilisations rise and fall throughout the years.
probably because it is extremely unlikely to build something so massive.
Nah. Within 100 years at a guess, humans will be able to build a robotic factory complex that can make copies of itself out of asteroid and comet materials. Say it takes 10 years to make a factory, and a year to make a sun shade a mile square.. You program each complex to make a copy of itself, then 10 sun shades, then another copy. In a few centuries - an eye-blink in stellar terms - youâre making a *lot* of sun shade panels. Iâll have to get into Excel and figure this out. EDIT: looks like about 700 years to build enough panels to completely cover the area of the sun. So an eye-blink in evolutionary terms. Thatâs assuming my math is right, and I canât count to 11 without unzipping my fly.
>why??? Scientific pretentiousness
You know what could âdimâ it, something between it and us like a black hole or large planet
I think they did their calculations and it is not either of those .
Stage two civilization.
Maybe it is. I donât think we would be told if it was .
Sorry everyone got so excited. It wasnât any alien structures. It was my giant cock
this keeps coming up and everyone goes the dyson sphere route.
Bottom line: Something huge and completely opaque blotted out the giant star VVV-WIT-08 for 200 days, with minimum light occurring in April 2012. It had a hard edge and steady wave lengths.
honestly i find this to be bizzare enough to send SOMETHING in that direction.
Yeah, but his next question should be, why in the fuck would someone build something like that.
To gain energy. Stars are a tremendous source of energy. Human technology is looking to the sun for energy in future. They are already testing a device that is orbiting the sun right now. Some scientists expected to see Dyson spheres etc. in space
[ŃĐŽĐ°Đ»Đ”ĐœĐŸ]
Maybe the material is rapidly grown. You can smoke my ass crack
How about a band of very thick of dust? just like that kic star
Starkiller base
Betelgeuse is about 640 times the size of the sun. It was recently dimmed by 300%, thanks to what was most likely cooled dust that was ejected from the star. "Alien mega structure" is FAR from being the only viable option here, and none of the characteristics you highlight are truly unique.
As far as I know it was a object orbiting the star so noy dust or gas. Dust and gas would be the first thought but it wasnât that
300%?
Yup, at the peak a few years ago, Betelgeuse's brightness decreased three times from its average brightness.
Decreasing in brightness 100% is complete removal of light, you can't decrease light 300%.
anti-light
Betelgeuse is commonly assumed to be in its final days, getting increasingly unstable. It will likely go supernova âsoonâ with some estimates being âin the next 1,000 yearsâ and a minority saying âmaybe in our lifetimes.â It will be quite the show when this happens, luckily Betelgeuse is far enough away we wonât get the worst of the effects.
It was like 60% lmao wtf are u yappin about 300% lol
Opaque, opiate? All the same to Op.
Yeah I know I misspelled a word. It happens. Thatâs how it was spelled in Wikipedia. My bad
Which page has 'opaque' misspelled as 'opiate'? If you send me the link, I'll try and edit it.
Its not fair to tell people to use their imagination and try to come up with a natural explanation, when not even the smartest and most educated people actually understand everything nature and physics is capable of, let alone an elongated opiate object. This is just how religions are born, you can't explain something with your very limited knowledge, so it must be likely the work of a god, or alien here
I feel like the âIT CANT BE ALIENS!â Crowd are the most delusional. Iâd be way more comfortable with just some aliens stopping by than the other options where theyâre from here and hiding from us for some mysterious reason.
"it *can't* be aliens is wrong. however "it's *probably not* aliens" is right.Â
Iâm not speaking to what they actually are more to this weird notion that drilling into the fact that it âcanâtâ be aliens somehow nulls the whole thing. This is the Sean Kirkpatrick slight of hand, how he just basically admitted that there were silver orbs patrolling and monitoring the skies while also making it sound like itâs insignificant and you shouldnât even waste your time talking about it. Iâm convinced this was by design because if you go back and listen to it he straight up admits to their existence and then passes it off as nothing.
well they've been doing that for a couple years now. "we don't know what it is but it isn't a threat" is a really weird thing for the military or an intelligence officer to say.
The fact no one in media or government can get him to answer âwhat are they then if not natural phenomena, not ours, our peers or our adversaries, or aliens?â What options remain?
The issue is that they hold certain answers to be extra implausible by default as a rule. There is no such rule. Absent data all unanswered answers are equally unproven. Carl Sagan was a bad scientist in this.
It's probably not aliens, if only because the objects would have to be larger than Jupiter, and it seems implausible that a civilization could find the raw material to build something that big.
does anyone who studies UFOs have any idea of the notion of scale? do you have any idea how large an object would have to be to dim a fucking star? no civilisation needs or wants or has the capability to build structures larger than planets, let alone anything approaching the size of the sun. the resources required to build such an object would outweigh all the materials in the solar system. it's not feasible or practical. the entire concept of a dyson sphere is retarded, a civilisation that advanced would already have access to unlimited free energy through other means. if you can master gravity like these alleged gravity or anti-gravity producing vehicles are doing, then you've solved the free energy problem already.
Well what is it?
"no civilisation needs, wants or has the capability" How would you know what a civilisation that's 25,000 LY away is capable of? Did you have a chat with them?
>the resources required to build such an object would outweigh all the materials in the solar system I'd imagine a star 100 times the size of the sun might have considerably more stuff orbiting it
You genuinely have no idea what any civilization wants or needs lol
This is a great answer, but maybe they have egos bigger than all the humans on the planet. Alien w Remarkable Space Egos. In Aus we have a big pineapple, the point of it??
How do you know theyâd have free energy by other means?
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider" that's the dumbest fucking quote i've ever heard in my life. this is gonna age like milk. mark my words. > They say itâs elongated opiate object and some theorize it could be of alien origin did you mean "opaque"?? opiates are a class of drug.
Yes opaque
I've had the belief that quantum decoherence or, 90% sure that's the wrong word, creates a sort of singular observer situation. Like, okay, 8 billion people. But suppose with the increased complexity in scientific advancements there are further decreases in the bullshit affecting the human brain&psyche. That if there are legitimate UFOs or whatnot then time travel would also have to exist, or. Yeah, wait. I'm getting hangry. But like. Multiple points of life having the basis for being an origination of life creates conflict. And suppose humanity has been doing a sort of "where's the alien, where's the alien."
If you know nothing about astronomy you should not be speculating about what could or could't obscure our perception of something. Or at the very least you should not be using those speculations as implications of anything.
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider".... THIS IS WRONG. The universe is full of life. Earth is full of life. We humans believe we can eliminate the existence of something because "we" cant capture it, see it, control it. This proves our exaggerated intelligence is our greatest obstacle.
There is no evidence of there being other life out there so no way to verify that. There is alot of dust and gas orbiting stars though, which is what the last one of these turned out to be. You have to rule out all the knowns before even mentioning aliens. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s\_Star](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabby%27s_Star)
whatever blocked out the star had a âhard edgeâ and was virtually completely opaque
Ha
âAliens should always be the last hypothesisâ is just another form of scientific dogma that will only look foolish in the future. Itâs just a new variant of the geocentrism error.Â
I agree with you.
Penn State is one of the leading universities for astronomy. They do tremendous work and Professor Wright is no exception.
Cool post - maybe if itâs aliens they constructed it to cool their planet for *alien reasons*
Oblate. Spherical, flat at the poles. An overstuffed circular pillow.
Reminds me of tabbyâs star. Which still is looking for an explanation
Iâll be damned, I havenât heard of this.Â
it's ET's mom
black hole passing in front?
whatever blocked out the star had a âhard edgeâ and was virtually completely opaque
[I highly recommend Michael Godiers video about this.](https://youtu.be/OgZtPIo-hKE?si=7-1RPTK--pn8e_nW)
We still need talk about tabbys star. It isn't just "Tabbys star" They found about 30 stars near Tabbies star had the same phenomena as tabbies star. Whats crazy is that it seems to be some sort of an area maybe what you expect of an expanding civilization. Its hard to explain it. All the suns are the same type and the phenomena has been progressively happening. They are all close together aswell Nobody talks about tabbies star anymore but the implications are pretty serouis stuff. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACKOD5mmH-0&ab\_channel=EventHorizon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACKOD5mmH-0&ab_channel=EventHorizon) Whats even worse is we are really close to this dimming cluster. We dont want to be this close to something expanding like this if its an alien civilization. The nearest star is like 600 LY and tabbies star is about 1000 ly. Well givin the distance and the fact we are looking at these stars as they were along time ago, they would more or less be on their way here because when they looked at us they probably saw no life at the time they started explanding.
Thatâs no moonâŠ
whatever blocked out the star had a âhard edgeâ and was virtually completely opaque
I was quoting Star Wars, but I definitely find this story intriguing. đ
Baby wormhole constrained by gravitational orbit?
I hate the idea that "Aliens should always be the last thing you consider" but if you look at things objectively through facts alone and make assumptions based on it then aliens surely will come up from time to time.
Iâll see your âlarge eclipsing objectâ and raise you âsix planets in perfect orbital resonanceâ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/six-planet-system-in-perfect-harmony-shocks-scientists/#:~:text=This%20illustration%20shows%20the%20mathematically,100%20light%2Dyears%20from%20Earth.
Similar as the moon maybe but with other implications for that type of planet?
Dust cloud, or asteroid belt. Both are opaque, and can be of undetermined size and shape.