 By now, you know that I really enjoy exploring speculative topics in science, and particularly the scientific probings, the speculation lying on top of the scientific probings of the eventizing, unknown territory at the peripheral of our embodied experience, you know, being stuff we can't tangibly touch, but we can observe out in the great, beyond the great, unknown space in our local galaxy. And tonight we're gonna look a little more deeply into astronomical techniques, particularly SETI, with the, meaning the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and intriguing observed phenomenon, phenomena out there that falls into the category of something that we've observed, that we can speculate on, is KIC846. This star was one of many observed continuously for years by the Kepler space observatory, and it was noticed in late 2015 that there was some peculiar dips in its brightness that do not match up to the phenomena we've previously observed. The Kepler space observatory is a space observatory launched by NASA to discover Earth-sized exoplanets or planets orbiting other stars named after astronomer Johannes Kepler. While these, while these dips in brightness are almost certainly a natural phenomenon, we never like to rule out the idea that strange things might be results of either errors or artificial tinkering of the instruments. So it's been suggested errors of, sorry I misread that, errors of our instruments or artificial tinkering of, it's been suggested it could be as a mega structure. A Dyson sphere is an example of that, just exactly what you would imagine. Something so large artificially in this episode into this topic into two parts. Today's part, tonight's part is going to be elaborating on exactly what the Kepler space observatory does and has done and has observed and how it observes and lots of other ideas about how we interpret that data. And at the very end I will tell you about Tabby's star and in part two we're going to find out using scientific techniques or at least being informed by the possibilities this observation of a dimming star could mean. So I guess if you're watching this a day or two after this has come out then more than likely you'll have part two to jump right to if you want to get into the much more speculative aspect of this topic. But I think it's a good idea to have a basic fun as it is to observe especially out in space and immediately assume it's aliens. I want to be sure not to do that too quickly to make sure we we've tried to explain it as best we could with known features first. Features of our universe. So what is the Kepler Observatory? So this was launched in 2009. It it doesn't orbit Earth but actually orbits it trails. It was designed to trail Earth's own orbit around the Sun and getting further and further out. So as it trails it's going to recede to a much larger diameter in orbit orbital diameter and of course it's now over a hundred million miles away from us. It got further behind us in our orbit because it's it is a bit further from the Sun than us and the further you're away from a star so which is pretty important to Exoplanet finding. But for our purposes right now it means that Kepler is a long way behind us. Now what this observatory observes is pretty straightforward. It's a photometer which means it measures brightness. In this case Kepler constantly sounds like a lot but is actually only looking at the same patch of sky. It's a very small patch too. That chunk is incidentally between Vega and Deneve. You probably know Deneve as the star that makes up the tail of the sickness swarm and Vega is the constellation Lyra both of which are fairly close to the big and little dippers and the North Star Polaris. In fact Vega was the North Star for our ancestors about 13,000 years ago and when the Ice Age was ending and it's actually a whole other topic. The relation based on evidence both the Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza were actually built much much further back in time than we are modern Egyptologists. Sphinx is a lion and as far as we know the zodiac signs of the constellations have stayed consistent and the lion is found to be looking at itself. It's analog in the night sky 13,000 years ago. If you use astronomical data and reverse engineer the orbital mechanics of our solar system what you'll find is that Earth is on a slight wobble and although it does this at an angle it rotates on its own axis as it orbits around the Sun. If you sped it up and looked at it more like a really fast spinning top you would find that just like a top it actually wobbles a little bit like that and each cycle takes about 26,000 years for it to that's all to say that maybe I'll do an episode on that soon. It's very very fascinating and it's based on the fact that the Sphinx shows signs of rain weathering which we all know Egypt is a desert and the only water it gets is from the life-giving vein of the Nile River but anyways that's speculation which I of course love in just how we we find other planets. Earth has a 26,000 year planetary procession and at the moment that makes Polaris the North Star. And Vega will get its turn again but it's also where terms like the age of Aquarius come from since the Sun appears in the spring equinox of the northern hemisphere and one of the zodiac constellations that changes every couple thousand years so Kepler tilts its eyes up and looks at the patch of sky year-round and it just watches for any increase or decrease in brightness of those stars in that patch which is again about 150,000. Many of these stars have other names or catalogs numbers too but they exist in the Kepler input catalog KIC so that's why Tabby Star is prefaced by that. Kepler wasn't looking for new stars it was observing known ones but not many stars actually have names since there are many of them so many of them that it's uh it isn't unusual for one to have multiple catalog entries so as far as the naming convention because there are multiple sets of catalogs I guess they're called that aren't always in communication with each other the same star can be named multiple things can have multiple names if it's being observed by two different groups of either amateur astronomers or actual astronomers so if there is something interesting found about a star in particular it's really kind of arbitrary what it's named but there are a lot of exoplanets and a lot of them have names beginning with Kepler or Geese Glease and then a number in that name just tells you the catalog the Glease catalog for instance is a catalog of nearby stars originally published in 1957 by the German astronomer Wilhelm Glease and it's been kept up for and surprisingly a lot for those stars of those stars had no other name and uh so these this catalog was the first one from which astronomers, astronomers draw from to as candidates to look for exoplanets around stars so um you're gonna see a lot of Glease or Kepler for star names but that's just a a convention that happened because scientists aren't known to be the most creative people and they are the most efficient to their credit so why bother naming a million different astronomers names when you could just have one or two and maybe in the future rename it if it becomes particularly exciting and worth revisiting a lot maybe into um like having and naming the island Atlas or Rand McNally because that's what modern Atlas is are called or that's what books with maps of places are called and um one of the main manufacturers like one of the main catalogers of stars Glease is Rand McNally so just as an analogy so how do we hunt for exoplanets stars dim for many reasons ours even fluctuates in brightness and they all do but a common cause is from an object getting in the way and a pretty big object to cause a star it takes a pretty big object to cause a star to notice dim or at least a pretty close object for instance mercury blocks a lot more light than Mars does actually even though it's quite a bit smaller now detect a planet this way you need three things first you need for its orbitable orbital plane to be tilted towards us in other words you wouldn't see mercury you need it to be in the line of sight if it's if it's orbiting this way from your perspective you wouldn't be able to see it because it doesn't traverse so we can't see an exoplanet around a star that's orbital plane is cocked away from us and that's that's most of them honestly because it's just a crap shoot people tend to think that solar systems line up with the galactic plane but they mostly don't actually ours is even tilted about 60 degrees off of it which you know 45 is like that so 60 degrees is even more second you need there to be a plane a planet there that's big enough or close enough to the sun to block enough light for us to notice it and that's why virtually all the original exoplanets were huge things of size even closer to the sun than Jupiter was is and therefore we called them hot Jupiters and the first things we observed because they are easier to observe the bigger it is the more light light it blocks but the closer it is the more light it blocks as well more likely it is to be between us and that star a tiny little planet like Pluto far away from the sun is very unlikely to line up with its star it also takes a long time to orbit which is the third thing you need to stare at these stars for a long time to not only see dimming but also a repeat of that dimming because after all this we're talking about science here and we need repeatable phenomena we need evidence and the result of the experiment has to be reproducible so you want at least two or three times earth would block light for instance to an observer from another star system once a year here by definition Pluto would do it every couple of those centuries and until you've seen this periodic dimming at least a couple times once you've observed it at least twice preferably thrice you can take that period and say there's a planet there and it has an orbital orbital i always say that in an orbital period i always want to add more syllables syllables an orbital period of so many days and from that combined with the star's mass you can calculate how far it is from its own sun you can then take that star's brightness and determine if that planet might be close enough to have liquid water on it instead of ice or far enough away from the sun that it's not boiling and uninhabitable we call this the goldilocks or habitable zone i did not if earth a much more massive star but at the same distance our year would be shorter and we'd also burn to death because there's a fact that more massive stars are more brighter a star twice as massive as our own isn't twice as bright it's actually about 10 times as bright it's not a linear relationship we also wouldn't be around such a star anyway since a star twice as massive as our own sun would only have a lifespan of about a little over a billion years and the sun was yeah good four billion years old before animals started emerging just look for planets around distant suns we have after all found thousands of them in the last decade we look for planets in the habitable zone at least said he does eplur's method which is just one of the exoplanet hunting methods is a pretty good one for those types of those types of funds if for instance we detected a drop of less than percent a percent in a star's brightness for a day or so once every 750 days around the star about half again our sun's mass and about five times as bright we'd know that there was a reasonably earth-sized planet hanging out about 1.8 astronomical units or so this would be 1.8 AU in other words is just 1.8 times the distance us to the sun in question would get about half again as much light as we do in terms of sunlight per unit area meaning it would be pretty hot but maybe habitable we wouldn't much care about one blocking more than a percent of light because it would be too big to be potentially habitable as a planet and one blocking a lot more than a percent would presumably be huge we wouldn't much care and by the way um this is kind of a you know it's um it's a document I made based on numerous articles I found on Google but it was inspired by Isaac Arthur's channel is episode on Dabby Star so if I were you guys I would highly recommend going to a way too huge for you and a gas giant if it were orbiting that far out and when you're collecting data from about 150,000 stars each day for years at a time you're not looking at that raw data you have a computer shuffling through it and um it only knows to look for the exact characteristics that you have programmed into it all right so now specifically talk about this star now named Tabby Star after it's got enough recognition and has been revisited because it is half again our sun's mass about five times brighter than our sun as we just said we've detected this anomaly twice in a dip in brightness of 15 percent we had a dip in brightness of 15 percent the first time in 22 percent the second time we saw it the first time was in March 2011 the second time was in March uh February of 2013 so spread of about 750 days so Kepler launched May I mean sorry March 2009 so we just missed the chance to see it then the observatory was having a problem in April of 2015 and Tabby Star is in fact at it again on Friday of this year in 2018 March 16th Tabitha Boyan Jen astronomer who was responsible for discovering the stars reported that the star was dimming yet again and observed in 2013 you know we're going to speculate mainly in order to learn what possibilities there are out there but for now to probably not be dismissed as pseudoscience scientists which is uh really the worst yeah probably the um the worst derogatory defamation you can give a sign a real scientist to call him a quack quackademic pseudoscientist to use john anthony west's but nonetheless there uh nasa or i think maybe seddy's official statement was that they believe it was just a they think it was a dust cloud thought it was a um or a big cloud of dust spread out and unevenly distributed so it was creating uneven clumps the dip was huge but not what was being looked for since it most definitely wasn't an earth-sized habitable zone planet with that period it would be closer to venus than earth in how much light it gets it would be a lot bigger than jupiter second bigger dip was also very irregular dimming then very slightly brightened and dimming way more something you might expect off a double planet or coincidental conjunction of two planets at the same time that it was orbiting so nobody noticed it because or for the before the third occasion would have happened and it was actually volunteers or citizen scientists as they've been getting called who poured through the data manually in the planet hunters project citizen scientists and astronomy has in fact relied on them for a really long time but regardless i like the initiative to bring more folks into the hunt and the fact of crowdsourcing it's awesome you know it's uh one of the great effects of our globally connected internet era civilization units starting to show up as a uh genuine alternative to either government or big business research especially in things like saty and astronomy in general i find it you know both fascinating incredibly potentially useful anyway nobody saw it in time for the 2015 dip or we could have arranged to look at it without kepler uh without kepler which was malfunctioning at the time but once they did send it on the uh onto the astronomers who went what the fuck it was part of the language but that was what they said um they nicknamed it the wtf star but what they proclaimed a mean by that was actually uh wears the flux in reference to the weird flux in brightness eventually instead of calling it by its kepler catalog number or its technically not a curse word cognom and everyone started calling it for the lead author of the team that wrote it up astronomer tabitha boyan boyajian boyajian tabby star and she's also led the campaign to get funds to observe the star in more detail and in different frequencies than first as i mentioned a dip of this magnitude at that distance is that this thing is huge whatever it is um what does all this tell us you know it's it's much bigger than jupiter it's hotter than earth since it gets about 150 times our star is an f3 star either on the main sequence or in the late stage of what we call a sub giant decently brighter than a main sequence star of its mass should be not tones like an actual red giant but the assumption is this is an old star that's near the end of its life and uh that's been challenged more recently but we'll get to that next episode now for a star of this mass it would mean creeping up on about three billion years and again our own sun is about 4.6 billion years obviously we'll we'll be talking about the alien artifact option which is the megastructures or um artificial dimming of the sun but i want to drive home now that this thing is around the stars that's maximum lifetime would have caused it to die right about the same time multicellular organisms were just coming to existence on earth and the thing in question is pretty hot compared to earth so it's not a great candidate uh for for uh alien life so guys i once again hope you enjoyed this um a lot of you guys really really well a lot of you were probably here because you saw the kepler kepler carter shaft scale video and um i'm just really pumped that you guys somehow it went like semiviral for for me at least only i like you know a couple thousand subs less than two months ago but i i don't know i try to listen to the feedback and i try to learn and pick up on what it is you guys for the most part are interested in i know not everybody's interested in history and mythology and religion and philosophy and psychology and i know these more astronomical grandiose cosmic cosmological investigations episodes speculations can be a lot more suitable for asmr and sleep so you guys enjoy it so we'll definitely always i appreciate your feedback your support you guys are really just encouraging me to keep going and it's really nice and 99 percent of your comments actually i'm gonna say 99.9 even those of you who might initially come off as aggressive or disgruntled for whatever reason i try my best to respond to everybody and even you guys maybe you're probably just having a bad day because you always come around you know i i didn't mean to come off as this or that and maybe maybe just initially wrote that because you didn't think i would respond so to me 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