After comparing data from Spitzer and Swift—an infrared and ultraviolet telescope—whatever the heck the three dimensional distribution of the material causing the brightness dips, the long-term secular dimming of the star is being caused by dust. Over the course of a year of observations the star dimmed less in the infrared than in the ultraviolet, with the light extinction dependent upon wavelength in a way that screams dust of a size larger than primordial interstellar dust (and thus likely in the star system rather than somewhere between us) but still dust.
Still a weird situation. There cannot be a very large amount of dust in total since there is no infrared excess, so we must be seeing small amounts of it pass directly between the star and us.
The dipping is also semiperiodic, to the point that a complex of dips beginning in May was predicted months in advance.
I read in one Russian blog that they calculated the form of objects able to produce such dips. It occurred to be 10 million kilometres strips orbiting the star. I think it is very similar to very large comet tails.
The dust probably is just dust—scattering of blue light more than red is the same reason the sky is blue and the sun looks red at sunset (Rayleigh scattering / Mie scattering). It comes from scattering off of particles smaller than a few times the wavelength of the light—so if visible light is being scattered less than UV, we know that lots of the particles are of size smaller than ~2 um. This is about the size of a small bacterium, so dust with interesting structure isn’t totally out of the question, but still… it’s probably just dust.
Latest results on KIC 8462852 / Boyajians Star:
After comparing data from Spitzer and Swift—an infrared and ultraviolet telescope—whatever the heck the three dimensional distribution of the material causing the brightness dips, the long-term secular dimming of the star is being caused by dust. Over the course of a year of observations the star dimmed less in the infrared than in the ultraviolet, with the light extinction dependent upon wavelength in a way that screams dust of a size larger than primordial interstellar dust (and thus likely in the star system rather than somewhere between us) but still dust.
Still a weird situation. There cannot be a very large amount of dust in total since there is no infrared excess, so we must be seeing small amounts of it pass directly between the star and us.
The dipping is also semiperiodic, to the point that a complex of dips beginning in May was predicted months in advance.
I read in one Russian blog that they calculated the form of objects able to produce such dips. It occurred to be 10 million kilometres strips orbiting the star. I think it is very similar to very large comet tails.
That’s interesting… is the dust size still consistent with artificial objects?
The dust probably is just dust—scattering of blue light more than red is the same reason the sky is blue and the sun looks red at sunset (Rayleigh scattering / Mie scattering). It comes from scattering off of particles smaller than a few times the wavelength of the light—so if visible light is being scattered less than UV, we know that lots of the particles are of size smaller than ~2 um. This is about the size of a small bacterium, so dust with interesting structure isn’t totally out of the question, but still… it’s probably just dust.