A previously unremarked star in the constellation Cygnus has, in the past year, become known as the most mysterious object in our Galaxy. Boyajian's star exhibits puzzling episodes of sporadic dimming discovered in photometry with the Kepler Mission. Proposed explanations have focused on its obscuration by colliding exo-planets, exo-comets, and even intervention of alien intelligence.These hypotheses have focused on phenomena external to the star because the radiative flux missing during the dimmings was believed to exceed the star's storage capacity. We point out that modelling of variations in solar luminosity has shown that convective stars can store the required fluxes efficiently, thus removing the need for such esoteric explanations. Rather ,studies of Boyajian's star may produce important new insights into stellar magneto-convection.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.00070
That's possibly quite a significant finding. I think. Depending on whether they can establish a bit more solidly that that was what is going on. Not that I've read the paper yet.
ReplyDeleteI've read the paper, but I don't know enough about stellar interiors or thermodynamics to comment. I noticed that discussions with Boyajian and Schaefer were mentioned in the acknowledgements though.
ReplyDelete