"Extraterrestrial megastructures" - an exobiologist's explanation for very weird star

[DucatiMonster696]

You must be thinking of the Oort Cloud.

The Oort Cloud is the asteroid/comet belt near/beyond Pluto roughly.


The second belt is indeed between Mars and Jupiter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_belt#/media/File:InnerSolarSystem-en.png

 

[Paratus]

Wishful thinking used to keep one's donors donating to a program that will not produce any real or significant results because it relies on the singular idea that extraterrestrial beings are using radio waves to communicate. Never mind the vastness of space that makes pointing listening devices into the skies in hopes of catching ET broadcasting his tele-novellas into space about as likely as fishing out a specific and distinct grain of sand dropped somewhere in the middle of the vast oceans of the world by someone else. Or that we could somehow accurately spot, perceive and discriminate some mega structure apart from all other naturally occurring objects in the universe tens, hundreds, thousands of light years away using our current technology.

Good thing we had you here to point all that out. I'm sure it's never occurred to SETIs donors that there's a very small chance of success. It's also good of you tell the astronomers what their instruments can and can't tell them.

 

[Pipeline 1010]

Do we have any reason for ruling out a binary system, with one star being dark or too dim to see? That might be large enough to do the task on a periodic basis.

It's not periodic...that's what makes this star so interesting. From the article, the light is being blocked out at random intervals, which would rule out any single body orbiting the star. This is why a sufficiently dense asteroid belt would be a promising culprit...only asteroid belts don't seem to get dense enough to block light like that.

I'm not saying it's aliens. But it's aliens.

 

[CZroe]

An asteroid belt massive enough to block 20% of a sun would out weight the sun and be forming planets due to mutual gravity attraction. At a thousand light years a nebula or black hole would be easily detected and effects accounted for. What I am thinking is that a natural massive feature in orbit would cause a wobble in the star while a manufactured one would be light and cause no such effect.

Would a rogue black hole that passed by only once, disturbing the Oort Cloud, be detected or are you only talking about an orbiting system? It could be that the biggest dip was from a passing black hole and the smaller ones were the disturbed Oort Cloud bodies smashing themselves to bits.

 

[alcoholbob]

Giorgio Tsoukalos' career has just been revived.

 

[Paratus]

Ichinisan in the OT thread figured it out:

 

[HTFOff]