A mysteriously dimming star located about 1,480 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus and known as Tabby's star is, in fact, a binary stellar system, made up of a F-type star and a smaller red dwarf star.
This object, a star, could have some sort of orbiting debris that periodically blocks the starlight, but researchers say they need more observations to figure out if that’s possible or if the flicker is caused by something else.
Tabetha Boyajian and her colleagues reported that the star experienced its greatest dip since it was observed by the Kepler mission in 2013.
A new study suggests that the cause of the dimming over long periods is likely an uneven dust cloud moving around the star. This flies in the face of the “alien megastructure” idea and the other more exotic speculations.
Tabby's star is dipping drastically in brightness, giving astronomers an opportunity to figure out what has been causing this star's weird behavior.
Tabby’s star has provoked so much excitement over the past year that UC Berkeley’s Breakthrough Listen project is devoting hours of time on the Green Bank radio telescope to see if it can detect any signals from intelligent extraterrestrials.
"Tabby's Star" has dramatically dimmed. Something passed in front of it, dimming its starlight a whopping 20 percent and other jumbled transit signals revealed that something wasn't quite right with this particular star.
To find out what's going on around the weirdest star in the galaxy, astronomers are turning to crowdfunding.
