Tabby's Star: Berkeley investigates mysterious star

Tabby's star has provoked so much excitement, with speculation that it hosts a highly advanced civilization capable of building orbiting megastructures to capture the star's energy, that UC Berkeley's Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if they can detect any signals from intelligent extraterrestrials. Breakthrough Listen, which was created last year with $100 million in funding from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation and its founder, internet investor Yuri Milner, won't be the first to search for intelligent life around this star. "Everyone, every SETI program telescope, I mean every astronomer that has any kind of telescope in any wavelength that can see Tabby star has looked at it," said Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and of Breakthrough Listen. "It's been looked at with Hubble, it's been looked at with Keck, it's been looked at in the infrared and radio and high energy, and every possible thing you can imagine, including a whole range of SETI experiments. Nothing has been found." While he and his colleagues are skeptical that the star's unique behavior is a sign of an advanced civilization, they can't not take a look. The observations are scheduled for eight hours per night for three consecutive nights, starting Wednesday evening, Oct. 26. Siemion and two colleagues, , are traveling to the Green Bank Observatory in rural West Virginia to work with a new and more sensitive instrument recently installed on the telescope. "The Green Bank telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it's the largest most sensitive telescope that's capable of looking at Tabby star given its position in the sky," he said. "We've deployed a fantastic new SETI instrument that connects to that telescope, that can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously and many, many billions of different radio channels all at the same time so we can explore the radio spectrum very, very quickly." The results of their observations will not be known for more than a month, because of the data analysis required to pick out patterns in the radio emissions from the region around the star. First reported a year ago by Yale astronomer Tabitha Boyajian, Tabby's star – more properly called KIC 8462852 – had been flagged by citizen scientists because of its unusual pattern of dimming. These volunteers were looking at planets as part of the internet project Planet Hunter, which allows the public to search for planets around other stars in data taken by the Kepler spacecraft, which has been monitoring 150,000 stars for regular dimming that might indicate a planet had passed in front of it. But while most such dimming by transiting planets is brief, regular and blocks just a few percent or less of the light of the star, Tabby's star dimmed for days at a time, by as much as 20 percent, and at irregular intervals. While Boyajian, now at Louisiana State University, speculated that the irregular dimming might be explained by a swarm of comets breaking up as it approached the star, subsequent observations show the star is far more irregular than a comet swarm would produce. In fact, it seems to have been dimming at a steady rate for the past. Speculation eventually arose that the dimming was caused by a Dyson structure: a massive orbiting array of solar collectors that physicist Freeman Dyson once proposed would be a natural thing for a civilization to build as it needed more and more energy to power it. Theoretically, such a structure could completely surround the star – what he termed a Dyson sphere – and capture nearly all the star's energy. How likely is that? "I don't think it's very likely – a one in a billion chance or something like that – but nevertheless, we're going to check it out," said Dan Werthimer, chief scientist at Berkeley SETI. "But I think that ET, if it's ever discovered, it might be something like that. It'll be some bizarre thing that somebody finds by accident ... that nobody expected, and then we look more carefully and we say, 'Hey, that's a civilization.'" Full Story: http://news.berkeley.edu/2016/10/25/breakthrough-listen-to-search-for-intelligent-life-around-weird-star/ Video by Roxanne Makasdjian and Stephen McNally Music: "Mario Bava Sleeps In A Little Later Than He Expected To" "CGI Snake" "Is that You or Are You You" "Out of the Skies Under the Earth" by Chris Zabriskie Additional footage provided by: Chris Schodt, NRAO/AUI/NSF, © NASA/JPL-Caltech, Videoblocks http://www.news.berkeley.edu/ http://www.facebook.com/UCBerkeley http://twitter.com/UCBerkeley http://instagram.com/ucberkeleyofficial https://plus.google.com/+berkeley Watch the Berkeley SETI Live Chat from Green Bank about Tabby's Star observations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ijyn0kAMTL8 https://seti.berkeley.edu/listen/ https://breakthroughinitiatives.org/Initiative/1