 Today, I'm going to introduce our speaker. He did his undergraduate degrees here at the UW, then went to San Diego State for a master's degree, and then came back to the UW to finish to do a PhD. You see a lot of headlines, especially about astronomers, because we study the cosmos. You see a lot of headlines that are like, ah, scientists don't know, or they're baffled, or they're stupefied, or whatever. A lot of ridiculous language about, thank you, about, you know, scientists not knowing things. And I want to just give you the punch line. We really don't know what the story with this star is. So I'm going to show you how we found it. I'm going to show you what we know about it. I'll show you some of the ridiculous theories that have come up and made lots of headlines. And so you can, you know, tweet about that. And then I'll level with you and say at the very end, again, we really don't know what the answer is. I'll give you our current best guess. January 2010, they showed the first results. And I was lucky enough to be there in Washington, D.C. I watched this talk, and it was one of those moments where you could just feel that the whole world had changed, the whole field of astronomy and exoplanets had changed. Because they released the first images, the first data. And these five here are real data of transits. You can see these tiny little transits and little animations to scale of the planets that you would see. But again, this was the first year of data, actually the first few months of data. This is orbital periods of three days, three days, five days. This is not what we're looking for. You would not want to live in an orbit five days away from the sun. Here's something that I've worked a lot on. I think this is really cool. And we expected this, but we didn't expect it to be as fruitful as it was. Kepler was able to measure stars actually spinning, actually rotating. We know the sun rotates. Galileo was one of the first to actually observe this with a telescope, which of course I have to legally say don't point a telescope at the sun because you will burn out your eyeballs. But if you put a really strong solar filter on that telescope, you can look at the sun. And if you go and look at the sun for days and days and days, you can actually see the surface turning. The sun turns about once every 25 days. And then we found Tabby's star. This is the headline from the actual paper that was published in Nature. This was the 10th paper in the Planet Hunters paper series as they were titling it. This is the phone number, the Kepler input catalog number 8462852. Now we just call it Tabby's star, Tabitha Boyajian, or Boyajian star is probably more appropriate. And the title was really WTF. Because that is what the conclusion paper was, like WTF is with this star. So let's jump in. What's really troubling about Tabby's star or Boyajian star is it is a totally seemingly normal F type star. What's an F type star? F type is just short hand for its temperature. It means it's between 6,600 degrees in the Kelvin scale. It doesn't matter. The point is, it's normal. There's nothing else unusual about it. The sun is a G type star. It's the next class cooler. There's your trivia for the day. Totally normal star. So how from a normal star with nothing else unusual about it, do you get these bizarre dips? But it's not supported by the data. We can't rule it out. Okay, so we return back to this idea. Maybe it's aliens, okay? And like the idea of aliens and SETI and UFOs gets a lot of flak in the astronomy community because oftentimes it's a lot of hyped up nonsense. But it is true that we do spend real money looking for aliens and astronomy. And we have to admit that it is possible, right? Anything that defies any explanation, this has to be at least a contender for. Now, we were talking before the class Occam's razor, right? Like this would be unbelievably extraordinary, right? And so we would need extraordinary evidence and we don't have it. But what is still bothering me and what we're going to be working on here at the University of Washington for the next few years, one of the projects in the astronomy department we'll work on, is where are the other stars like this? Why is Tabby star the only star we've ever seen do this? We've looked at a lot of stars in the night sky. We've studied the temporal evolution of stars here at UW over decades and never seen anything like this. So where the H is the other WTFs? That is the question that will drive some of my research in the next few years. And that's my last slide. Thank you.