A Team Astronomers Have Discovered Another Star That Has Thrilling Dips In Light For Anonymous Reasons

Stars shine and twinkle, but if one abruptly gets 65% dimmer
in one day, then there is something unusual going on. An international team of Scientists, headed by Dr Simone
Scaringi from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, has detected a young
star going through unbalanced and extreme dimming over a period of 25 days. The
object is called EPIC 204278916, is a low-mass star encircled by a tilted
proto-planetary disk, which might be the cause of the unfamiliar light,
observed.

The star was founded by the planet hunting telescope Kepler
during its K2 mission, and it was witnessed for almost 79 days.
Serendipitously, in the first two weeks of detection, the star's brightness
varied harshly, settling on a steady variation after the 25th day. Dr. Scaringi told IFLScience, "Other somewhat comparable
dipping young stellar objects have been discovered in the past, but I think it
is reasonable to say that none have been shown to display such extreme dipping activities
for such a short time."

This star will jog the memory people of Tabby’s star, it
became an immediate sensation for the (very far-off) option that the dimming
could be affected by a Dyson sphere, a theoretical mega-structure built by an innovative
alien race to get the most of the energy taken from a star. So is EPIC 204278916 surrounded by an even bigger Dyson
sphere? Not certainly. Explanations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed that this star is not
surrounded by an alien mega-structure but a more “traditional” mass disk.

Scaringi added, "We have discovered it to be hard to fully
explain the explanations, typically because the transiting material needs to be
very huge to cause the detected dips (similar to the size of the star) and transfer
the star relatively fast, but we do wonder on two scenarios. It is indeed
possible that the inner disk is twisted with respect to the outer disk,which
is resolved with the Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array ALMA observatory. This might cause erratic dips as the
material being accreted by the star is twisted and blocks some of the
starlight. Another possibility is that the starlight is being blocked by some
transiting circum-stellar clusters, probably cometary-like debris."

Published in a paper which is available online and acknowledged
for publication in the Regular Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, the
astronomers has excluded that the star itself is changing radically, though
they were able to find out some regular changings that happens as the star
rotates. EPIC 204278916 has had only 1/3 of the observing time as
that for Tabby’s star, so future research should reveal more information.
Kepler will re-observe the region next year, and the astronomers are following
a strategy to pursue this source from earth based telescopes as well.