re: UPDATED. A European Astronomical Observatory is Announcing an “Unprecedented Discovery”

The thought of discovering a Dyson Sphere is actually pretty scary. That is technological capabilities way beyond what we could ever understand. Difference between man and ant. Better hope they are nice.

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Actually, scientists think dust is what is causing Tabby's star's fluctuations in brightness.

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That was a reasonable supposition at first but after studying the idea it was dismissed because of a lack of infrared radiation. When dust is circling a star, it's heated and then gives off radiation in the infrared part of the light spectrum.

NASA's Spitzger Space Telescope, dedicated to analyzing infrared transmissions, was used to see if, indeed, dust was present in large amounts around the star. It didn't find any.

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Concerning the Dyson Sphere, the amount of raw material needed to construct one would consume the natural resources of many solar systems.

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Since we have no idea how to build a Dyson's Sphere, it would seem premature to estimate the resources needed to construct one.

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If they're that advanced they probably already know we're here.

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Other civilizations might know that earth has life because of the strong presence, 21%, of oxygen in our atmosphere. However, atmospheric markers of a technological civilization on earth have been present for only about 150 years. That means that intelligent species more than 150 light years away wouldn't yet know that a smart species had evolved here.

Tabby's Star is an estimated 1,280 light years from earth. Through their telescopes they would see an earth with an approximate date of 737 CE (or A.D. depending on how old you are). There were about 500 million people on earth then and they were almost exclusively agricultural so they weren't pumping chemicals into the air. They won't know for another 1,000+ years that we have become a technological civilization.

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University of Arizona astronomer Huan Meng and co-authors have found the long-term dimming of KIC 8462852-a main-sequence F-type star located in the constellation Cygnus, about 1,480 light-years from Earth- appears to be weaker at longer infrared (IR) wavelengths of light and stronger in a shorter ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths. Such reddening is characteristic of dust particles and inconsistent with more fanciful 'alien megastructure' concepts, which would evenly dim all wavelengths of light. The study is published in the Astrophysical Journal (arXiv.org preprint)

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Appears in Sci News, dated Oct. 9, 2017

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Appears in Sci News, dated Oct. 9, 2017

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I hope you don't regard this study as conclusive. Even the theorists don't. All they did was show that any dust orbiting Tabby's Star is big enough to avoid being pushed out of that solar system by radiation from the star.

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they did not address the shorter-term dimming events that happened in three-day spurts in 2017 and two brightening episodes in 2007 and 2014.

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The simplest answer is usually correct - Occam's Razor, and all that rot.
I guess until we can actually resolve Tabby's star, we'll never really know.

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The simplest answer is usually correct

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I agree. For me that's the idea that a very large planet was absorbed by the star. That would explain the long-term dimming over the past century. Dr. Bradley Schaefer of LSU analyzed 100 years of observation data by Harvard and discovered that the star had dimmed by 20% from 1890-1989.

Even our own sun is thought to have possibly absorbed one of its planets early in the formative stages of the solar system. The amount of lithium in the sun's outer layer seems to be too high and could have been added by eating a planet rich in the element.

Oxygen is a bio-marker for life on other planets, however the presence of oxygen doesn't necessarily mean that life is present. Chemical processes can also create oxygen without life being present.
If oxygen were detected on another world, we couldn't know for certain life was present, unless we went there or sent a research vessel.

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The last time that astronomers unveiled a groundbreaking discovery of this nature was when scientists working at LIGO (the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory) detected gravitational waves. Ultimately, the find ushered us into a new era in astronomy, allowing us to see the universe as never before.

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It was also proven that the researchers jumped the gun a bit on the discovery of gravitational waves (signs of the first light emitted by the Big Bang that would prove quantum mechanics and galactic inflation). It was shown that the instruments actually were viewing dust in space. The B-Mode still actually eludes researchers.

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Oxygen is a bio-marker for life on other planets, however the presence of oxygen doesn't necessarily mean that life is present. Chemical processes can also create oxygen without life being present. If oxygen were detected on another world, we couldn't know for certain life was present, unless we went there or sent a research vessel.

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Oxygen alone isn't a biomarker for life. There are accompanying compounds such as carbon dioxide and methane that would indicate the oxygen was being generated by life processes.

Also, the chemical processes that can cause oxygen to be released are short period whereas life-generated oxygen would be steady or periodical, as in seasonally variable.