[ExI] Tabby's Star

[Ben Zaiboc]

On 04/08/2023 02:15, spike wrote:
> Come on, me lads, you must have many ideas which have been bubbling 
> around in your bio-brains for the past several weeks, so let’s have 
> them.  It doesn’t need to be heavy thinking.

I have been thinking, on and off, about Tabby's star and the apparent 
spread of the wierd fluctuations to other stars near it.

Astronomy-wise, I'm pretty clueless, but I have a few questions that are 
probably trivial to dispose of by someone who does have a clue, but that 
I've never seen addressed:

What rules out some phenomenon between us and the observed cluster of 
stars that would explain the fluctuations, that has nothing at all to do 
with those stars (things like clouds of dust and rubble, a bunch of 
gravitational lenses, etc.)?

Do we know how clustered together the relevant stars are? (are they all 
within a certain distance of a defined epicentre, do they look like a 
reasonable distribution for a single civilisation spreading out into 
space, or does it look like a random distribution of a natural phenomenon)?

Have we looked in as much detail for the same things in completely 
different parts of the sky and found nothing? If this is a natural 
phonmenon, you'd expect the same kind of progress in finding them that 
we've seen with finding exoplanets. First one, then a few, then loads of 
them all over the place, as we learn what to look for and how to look.

Apart from the light fluctuations, is there anything else that looks odd 
about them? I'm thinking that if they're not natural, surely there would 
be other things that we could detect that wouldn't (or that would) be 
expected of a natural phenomenon (don't ask me what, as I said, IANAA (I 
Am Not An Astronomer), but I'd guess that looking at things like 
spectral type/s of the stars affected, presence or absence of 
exoplanets, anything detectably different to normal about their local 
region of interplanetary space (if that's meaningful), any differences 
in the light-occluding phenomena that would suggest the same process at 
different stages at different distances from a centre, in a way that 
makes sense, and probably dozens of other things I have no clue about).

B