Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - 18

Tabby's Star

Kepler ﬁeld
of view

Deneb
Den b
De

Vega
LYRA
CYGNUS

Altair
At r
AQUILA

KEPLER'S VIEW For four
years, NASA's Kepler mission
monitored stars within a chunk
of sky in Cygnus and Lyra.

K EPLER / CA RTER ROBERTS

One of us (Boyajian) announced the discovery with colleagues in the April 2016 Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. We found that, by the end of Kepler's primary
mission, this star had dimmed 10 times, each time by a
different amount between 0.5% and 20%. After every plunge,
which could last from days to weeks, the star's brightness
recovered completely.
Intriguingly, each dip in the light curve had a different "shape," indicating irregular changes in brightness. The
changes are far too deep to be due to a planet - whatever's
causing these dips has to be much larger. Moreover, the spacing between events isn't periodic, as you would expect from
the transit of a single orbiting object.
The star almost immediately captured the attention of
not just astronomers but also the general public - especially
when Jason Wright (Penn State University) and colleagues
published a paper exploring potential alien origins of the
star's strange behavior. Meanwhile, professional and amateur
astronomers alike have pointed their telescopes at the star to
search for possible causes of the previously observed changes
and to perhaps ﬁnd additional dimmings.
To date, no additional dips have been detected, although
the smallest dips observed by Kepler are too small to be
detectable from the ground. Yet with four years of Kepler data
and a bevy of follow-up observations at other wavelengths
including infrared and submillimeter, astronomers have more
than enough for scientiﬁcally sound speculation.

A Strange Four Years

Relative brightness

1.01

Dip #1

2

3

4

5

1.00
0.99

This light curve shows the brightness of Tabby's star over the course of the primary Kepler mission. There are ten blips in brightness,
though some of the latter ones contain dips within dips. The star typically took on the order of days - and, later in the mission, weeks
- to recover to its full brightness. The first dip was the one that caught the attention of copernicus123; the fifth was the one that
prompted another Planet Hunter to write, "Definitely SETI should look at it as quickly as possible."

0.98
0.97
0.96
100

200

300

400

500

600

700

800

Day of Kepler mission

0.95

0.90

0.85

0.80

7

8

9

1.01

10

7

0.95

0.90

0.85

J U N E 2 0 1 7 * SK Y & TELESCOPE

8

9

10

1.00
0.99
0.98
0.97
0.96
0.95

0.80
786 788 790 792 794 796 798 800

18

1.00

Relative brightness

5
Relative brightness

Relative brightness

1.00

1500

1520

1540

1560

1580

1500

1520

1540

1560

1580

T. BOYA JIA N E T A L. / MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE R OYAL
ASTR ONOMICAL SOCIE T Y, 2016 JA NUA RY 27

Close-ups

Sky and Telescope - June 2017

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Sky and Telescope - June 2017

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Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - Cover2
Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - 1
Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - Contents
Sky and Telescope - June 2017 - 3
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