[ExI] More Tabby's Star news

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf
Of Dan TheBookMan
Sent: Sunday, August 07, 2016 1:47 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] More Tabby's Star news

>...Just pure speculation on my part, but I was thinking a large object --
say a big Jupiter or a brown dwarf -- falls into the star X years ago --
where X is the number of years needed for it to dim the star enough. (In
other words, we're not seeing the actual collision, but only the aftermath
(even adding to light travel time and all that), however long that took. Of
course, this is adjusting the hypothesis to fit the data, but that's not
verboten, right? All one need do then is look for independent evidence of
this -- as opposed to just adding ever more epicycles.)...Dan



Ja, that came to my mind as well.  If a big rocky planet was in a highly
elliptical orbit, then something took off some angular momentum right out
close to its aphelion, then its perihelion would be pushed in closer to the
star.  If it came in close enough to interact with the star's atmosphere, it
could scrub off momentum on each pass, so the aphelion would drop and the
orbit frequency increase with each orbit.  Rocky and metallic stuff would
boil off in each pass, creating a bunch of orbiting debris, all of which
would remain in orbit around the star in varying orbit periods.

A slight possibility is that we happened to catch the event in realtime,
like the Google Maps car catching an image of a streaker: a rare event that
once in a long while is seen, given sufficient observation.  My fond hope is
that we are seeing a developing Kardashev 3 civilization, but my best guess
on Tabby's star is that we witnessed a rare example of a rocky planet
falling into a star.

spike