After going back through Spitzer space telescope infrared images, the star did not have an infrared excess as recently as earlier in 2015, meaning that there wasn’t some kind of event that generated huge amounts of persistent dust between the last measurements of spectra and the Kepler dataset showing the dips in brightness. This bolsters the ‘comet storm / icy body breakup’ theory in that that would generate dust close to the star that rapidly goes away and is positioned such that we are primed to see large fractions of it as it is generated close to the star rather than a tiny fraction of dust further away.
(This comes after the Allen telescope array, failing to detect anything interesting, put an upper limit on radio radiation coming from the system at ‘weaker than 400x the strength we could put out with Aricebo in narrow bands, or 5,000,000x in wide bands’ for what that’s worth)
More data on Kepler star KIC 8462852.
http://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/strange-star-likely-swarmed-by-comets
After going back through Spitzer space telescope infrared images, the star did not have an infrared excess as recently as earlier in 2015, meaning that there wasn’t some kind of event that generated huge amounts of persistent dust between the last measurements of spectra and the Kepler dataset showing the dips in brightness. This bolsters the ‘comet storm / icy body breakup’ theory in that that would generate dust close to the star that rapidly goes away and is positioned such that we are primed to see large fractions of it as it is generated close to the star rather than a tiny fraction of dust further away.
(This comes after the Allen telescope array, failing to detect anything interesting, put an upper limit on radio radiation coming from the system at ‘weaker than 400x the strength we could put out with Aricebo in narrow bands, or 5,000,000x in wide bands’ for what that’s worth)