KIC 8462852 Analysis - you can participate

Tabby Boyajian has a new initiative related to the analysis of light coming from the star known as Boyajian's Star that I've blogged about quite a bit here and spoken about over at the Wow! Signal.

The new initiative is about making telescope images in various wavelength bands from the Las

One of the Las Cumbres Telescopes

Cumbres Observatory network available in a regular basis for community analysis. These images will be centered around Boyajian's Star.

Citizen scientists will crack open the images, analyze the variations in the star's brightness at different colors, and look for emerging trends. It's a great project for a science or math class, or anyone of any age or background interested in participating. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and the willingness to learn. Help is available with every  step of the process.

The best way to get started is to go on over to the subreddit set up for this purpose, and ask your questions. Download and install AstroImageJ, grab the training images, follow the how-tos and other guidance we have published, and learn by doing. We are putting more information there almost daily, and we expect the first batch of images in about 3 weeks, weather permitting.

You will be participating in solving a scientific mystery. We don't know where the very fine dust is coming from that is causing the deep dips in brightness Boyajian's Star, and there is very likely other material involved that we haven't yet got much of a clue about.  The way these kinds of mysteries are typically solved is through lots of persistent and consistent effort by lots of people. Why not you?

I'm still perplexed - Tabby's Star Update for November 2017

Update: 29 November 2017

I've been meaning to put out an update for the last several months, and just when I am poised to do so, something else happens. So, here it is is, and I may need another update soon. It' s been an eventful few months, and if you haven't been following closely, you may want to read this.

The tl;dr

Kickstarter-funded observations of the star by the Las Cumbres telescope network began in 2016. There was a Winter interruption when the star was too close to the sun, but observations resumed in the Spring. From about mid-2016 there was a prolonged dimming episode which I am tempted to assume was related to what followed. In May, we saw our first of four dips, during which the overall slow dimming stopped and turned into a slow brightening. After the last dip in mid September, the star brightened for about one month, levelled off in brightness, and lately has been slowly dimming again. There are some new preprints out that contain some interesting tidbits.

July 2017 Update on Tabby's Star

If you want to know what is going on day to day with Tabby's Star, then the site Where's The Flux is an excellent resource. If you want to catch up on the basic info with sourced facts, you might want to check out the Wiki on /r/kic8462852. It includes a timeline of what has happened so far and a list of information sources - both the professional literature and more accessible materials as well.

In this post I'll try to create a bit more context without going overboard on the speculation. People love speculating on this star (as do I), but really very little of it is justified at this point. The hard work of observing and phenomenology has to take precedence. My main focus has been on figuring out the broad strokes of what it is we've been seeing since October of 2015 when this ordinary star suddenly became the focus of intense study.

More on the AAVSO trends for Boyajian's Star

My earlier post on the dimming of KIC 8462852 that might be observable in the AAVSO photometry was looking for a single trend line, which seemed to be just observable above the noise. I hedge there, because there are always assumptions not far below the surface that might spoil the result. The human brain and randomness are old enemies, and often when we want to see a pattern, it's just nature playing tricks on us.

A conclusive non-conclusion about dimming in the AAVSO data

I'm spending too much time on this, so will have to bring it to a close until the summer's observing is done.

I took one more look at the AAVSO data, this time doing something called binning, similar to what Brad Schaefer did with the DASCH data in his paper on dimming in the historic photographic plates. Binning takes several observations within a defined time period and averages them before attempting to fit a model to them. In this case, the model is a simple straight line. This has the effect of giving each time period an equal "vote" in the best fit to the model, even if there is much less data in one time period than another. In the case of the AAVSO data, some observers would report many observations over a short period of time, which tended to overweight their observations. Binning mitigates that.

Of course, you have to decide what period of time you will use for binning the roughly 500 day span we have so far. I arbitrarily picked 10 days, and averaged the observations for each observer over that time period. There were 47 AAVSO observers in all whose measurements survived the filtering process in the "V" passband.  There were 48 observers, but I identified one who temporarily had apparent problems with respect to the others, so was filtered out to make it simple.

The V Band Fit with 10 day binning

The Absolute, Definitive Truth About Alien Megastructures

The title of this post is a joke, or taken literally, an outright lie. The only definitive truth is that no one knows if anyone has ever built a megastructure, or even if they would if they could. I have persistent doubts if such things exist anywhere in the universe, but I can't yet tell you if such doubts are reasonable.

Update 8 December 2016: I left out one type of motivation for building a megastructure - planetary climate control. Although these "Dyson Dots" would be relatively small, they might be detectable for transiting planets. I need to run the numbers...

The Usual Disclaimer

So, we're going to be speculative here yet again, and very probably wrong. I won't be able to cite many facts, so if that is the sort of thing you like to read, perhaps now would be a good time to hit the back button.

But I'm Completely Serious

We are interested in the conjectured alien megastructures because we might have a chance to observe them with technology we have or could well have in the near future. These structures would be bigger than planets (my definition), and since we can observe planets about other stars, we might well be able to observe these things, and so looking for them is a kind of SETI. I've written before about why I think SETI is worthwhile.