[ExI] Fwd: Google Alert - Tabby's Star

[Stuart LaForge]

Here is an additional paper on the topic. This one is from Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3

Stuart LaForge



On 2026-07-17 09:09, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote:
> On 2026-07-16 20:22, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:
>> 
>>  Tabby's Star: The Light That Shouldn't Flicker - YouTube [2]
>> 
>>  YouTube
>> A star 1470 light-years away dims in ways no one can explain.
>> Scientists are still searching for answers. What do you think is
>> hiding in the dark?
>> 
>> So I responded:
>> 
>>  It may be natural, but about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year
>> sphere also flicker the same way. If it were only one, I can imagine
>> it is natural, two dozen clustered this way looks like a civilization
>> expanding into space at maybe 1/3 of C. If this is the case, what we
>> may be seeing is data centers out in the relatively cold
>> "computational zone" where the low temperature keeps down
>> computational errors. From the depth of the dip and the time of
>> crossing, it is in an orbit about as far out from the star as Jupiter
>> is from our sun, and the orbit would take about 19 years. Why would
>> aliens build such a thing? As a guess, they live in a data center,
>> hundreds of times as large as the Earth, as uploads. As another guess,
>> if we can resolve planets that far away, there is a planet in the
>> habitable zone around Tabby's star where they originated biologically.
>> The closest star that shows this behavior is only 511 ly from Earth,
>> so if you live a very long time, they may come here and process the
>> asteroid Vista into a data center.. Why don't we see any propulsion
>> lasers or hear any radio waves is a mystery. They probably don't have
>> FTL or they would have been here a long time ago.
> 
> I don't know about transforming Vista into a data center, as ET might 
> have to fight Musk over that, but Beatriz Villarroel et. al. examined 
> old photographs from the First Palomar Sky Survey and found transients 
> that are clustered in triangular or linear formations show up in one 
> plate, but are not there the next time that part of the ski surveyed.
> 
> Interestingly, these transients never showed up in earth's shadow (at 
> 22-sigma significance) suggesting that they are metallic objects 
> reflecting sunlight. This was years before Sputnik or any artificial 
> satellites were launched. Moreover, they seemed to increase in 
> frequency on the photographic plates around
> periods of nuclear testing and newspaper-reported UFO flaps.
> 
> https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe
> Abstract
> Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring 
> age offer a rare glimpse of the sky before the era of artificial 
> satellites. In this paper, we present the first optical searches for 
> artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. We 
> follow the method proposed in Villarroel et al. and use a transient 
> sample drawn from Solano et al. We use images from the First Palomar 
> Sky Survey to search for multiple (within a plate exposure) transients 
> that, in addition to being point-like, are aligned along a narrow band. 
> We provide a shortlist of the most promising candidate alignments, 
> including one with ∼3.9σ statistical significance. These aligned 
> transients remain difficult to explain with known phenomena, even if 
> rare optical ghosting producing point-like sources cannot be fully 
> excluded at present. We explore remaining possibilities, including fast 
> reflections from highly reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit, or 
> emissions from artificial sources high above Earth’s atmosphere. We 
> also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients 
> within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric 
> shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude. The deficit is still present 
> though at reduced significance (∼7.6σ) when a more realistic 
> plate-based coverage is considered. This study should be viewed as an 
> initial exploration into the potential of archival photographic surveys 
> to reveal transient phenomena, and we hope it motivates more systematic 
> searches across historical data sets.
> ------------------------------
> 
> So maybe they have visited us. Extraordinary claims require 
> extraordinary evidence. There is no smoking gun, but some intersting 
> evidence is accumulating.
> 
> Stuart LaForge
> 
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