Talk:Tabby's Star

Thanks for wonderful job updating consolidated plot

Renerpho, thanks for the marvelous job you've done updating the consolidated plot of Tabby's Star dimmings! And thanks to Bruce Gary for the data!

aliens

i am no expert but i saw the counter explanation to it being a alien structure being that the light would be even in all wavelengths. wouldn't this be true too if they were made of a transparent material? transparent solar panels now exist. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:C7F:567C:2F00:59E1:BF7:314A:909C (talk) 00:11, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Transparent solar panels let through visible light mostly, but heavily absorb in the ultraviolet below 400nm, and they also absorb more in infrared. But unless someone published on this topic in relation to this star, we won't be mentioning it here. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 05:39, 16 September 2022 (UTC)

Megastructures and the physics limits of computation

This is original research and because of that not suitable for Wikipedia. But it is something editors of this article might watch for since I can't imagine the information staying out of the media and science papers very much longer. One related paper is

https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.16111

"Rebuilding the Habitable Zone from the Bottom Up with Computational Zones" This article mentions 56 K for one of the computation temperatures, close to the measured 65 K.

I don't consider it at all likely that life forms could evolve except on a planet in the habitable zone. But once they have evolved, and lifted off into space (an interest of mine since 1975) it's hard to imagine what direction they might take. They might upload and move into cyberspace, in which case, they are going to make the fastest and most energy efficient computers physics will allow.

If they are individuals and want to communicate, then minimum physical separation is also a consideration. Still, the biggest dip object is around 2.5 seconds across.

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-star-with-random-dimming-has-become-one-of-the-most-mysterious-in-the-milky-way

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-bunch-of-potential-tabby-s-star-alikes-have-just-been-identified

This is sort of related to computers. Assuming they are megastructures, the only thing that makes much sense is computation. The idea of computronium and Jupiter Brains came from the Extropian list in the early 90s.. My contribution then was to pour cold water on the idea because a large brain is going to be a slow brain due to the speed of light.

If we are looking at data centers 400 times the area of the Earth, powered by more than a million times the energy humans use, and operating at around 65 K then what are they doing? Any ideas? Keith Henson (talk) 09:22, 8 September 2023 (UTC) Keith Henson (talk) 09:25, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

@Hkhenson: Indeed, this is mostly original research; it seems to be largely off-topic, too.

This leaves the three url's you posted. I don't see how the Arxiv paper would be a useful reference for this article, because 1. it doesn't mention Tabby's Star, and 2. it hasn't been peer-reviewed yet.

The second of the two ScienceAlert articles you posted is already used. However, the first one may be usable (not necessarily for the WP:OR content you were discussing, but in general). Renerpho (talk) 23:56, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

I have repaired the section that has used the second ScienceAlert article, which has been broken since June 2023.[1] Renerpho (talk) 23:57, 8 September 2023 (UTC)

Main source of luminosity fluctuations

Our article currently says

The main source of information about the luminosity fluctuations of Tabby's Star is the Kepler space telescope. During its primary and extended mission from 2009 to 2013 it continuously monitored the light curves of over 100,000 stars in a patch of sky in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.

sourced to a NASA Kepler FAQ. Such a source doesn't seem the best one, but in any case it's form before the published paper so unsurprisingly doesn't mention Tabby's star in any way AFAICT. I assume it verifies what Kepler did, but that's about it. Putting that aside I wonder if this needs to be reworded since I suspect even if it were true at one time (it was added in 2016 so not that long after public announcement), it's arguably no longer true. As the lead explains, the Kepler observations were what enabled it's discovery. And I assume that even going back through earlier observations from elsewhere, in the early days of us first noticing the unusual fluctuations e.g. in 2016 it may have been true we had very limited data about the fluctuations besides Kepler. But I'm guessing interest in this has been high enough that we actually have a lot of data now that isn't from Kepler hence the 2017, 2018, 2019 (probably continuing just no one added it) including from amateurs e.g. via AAVSO (see the Kickstarter 608159144/) which while maybe not able to provide the level of detail and precision, have by now possibly been observing for longer than Kepler. So while the Kepler data may still be an important part of the puzzle, I wonder if it's really still true it's the "main source". (One thing I'm not sure is how useful Kepler's post reaction wheel malfunction mission was for this, if its data was still very useful then perhaps it actually have decent data until 2018 but if not and it ended in 2013 then from late 2015 to now 2024 if quite a long period compared to 2009-2013.) Nil Einne (talk) 08:31, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're suggesting here, but it is my impression that not any Earth-based astrometry can replace Kepler, let alone amateur observations. ☆ Bri (talk) 17:05, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

@Nil Einne and Bri: Bruce Gary has quietly continued to collect data. However, the last time this Wikipedia article was updated with any new observations was around five years ago, and some of what it is saying is out of date by now. Newer observations can be found at [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9] and [10].

While AAVSO probably doesn't have much useful data, I'd say that by now, a comparable if not larger amount of high-quality data for this star does actually come from Gary alone than from Kepler. Both datasets are of similar precision, but Gary's data covers the last seven years (with all his data in the public domain, according to [11]), almost twice as long as the Kepler dataset.

I think the quote about Kepler being "the main source of information" is accurate, if we're talking about the information in this Wikipedia article. If we're talking about the information that's publically available then no, it's not true. Renerpho (talk) 05:33, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Not disparaging amateur observers, but I just don't see how American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) can be in any way on equal footing with a billion dollar space telescope. ☆ Bri (talk) 16:00, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bri: They are not. The data on AAVSO is almost entirely useless in this case. Renerpho (talk) 20:16, 15 October 2024 (UTC)

Bruce Gray is a bit of an exception. There are very few amateur astronomers who (reproducibly) reach his level of accuracy; and to my knowledge, noone else (professional astronomers included) has dedicated the past 7 years to observing essentially nothing but this one star. That's not to say that Gary doesn't give credit to quality data uploaded to AAVSO, if there is some. [12] has a lot of that, for example. Renerpho (talk) 05:02, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

@Bri: In the section titled "HAO Precision Explained" of [13], Gary explains the difference between his approach and what most other ground-based observers are doing, and how he can get data that's consistently better than 0.001 mag (and therefore comparable to photometry taken from space). Renerpho (talk) 05:26, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

I have no idea how accurate AAVSO or Gary's data is, but whatever Bri and User:Renerpho might believe, I'm fairly sure it's impossible for Kepler's 2009-2013 mission to have provided any data on 2017, 2018 and 2019 fluctuations and these are a significant part of the article. Yes they are not in the luminosity section and may use the title "light fluctuations" rather than luminosity fluctuations but it seems clear they are referring to luminosity fluctuations. If there is some obscure distinction between luminosity fluctuations and light fluctuations in astronomy, our article doesn't make this clear and so it's quite likely most other readers will be confused light me. The fact remains there is zero source for this, the FAQ was from before the Kepler data was published so it cannot support a claim about the data published later in 2015 being a "main source" and it definitely cannot support it being the main source about something that happened which 2017-2019. Although as I already noted, it makes no sense to suggest observations from 2009-2013 is how we know what happened in 2017-2019. It is possible Kepler data was used for the 2017 and 2018 info but this wouldn't be from "2009 to 2013" which is still what our article claims, and also wouldn't provide data for 2019. Nil Einne (talk) 15:59, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

BTW, to address Renerpho's point more directly, there are about 880 words in the 2017, 2018 and 2019 sections combined. There is about 490 words in the rest of the history of observations section combined with the Luminosity section. So again, I do not see how data from 2009-2013 could be the main source even in our article. While word count is only a loose way to measure the amount of information, even assuming "we're talking about the information in this Wikipedia article", I'm fairly sure I'm not the only reader who will be confused about how something from 2009-2013 and published in late 2015 can be the main source when we talk so much about stuff that happened way after this period.

Point being however they interpret it, I'm fairly sure most readers are going to be equally confused why we make the statement when we have so much info from after 2013. For more experienced readers who might be familiar with what Renerpho refers to about possibly high quality data from after 2019, I suspect they'll be even more confused.

They might also wonder about quantity vs quality. Knowing what happened continuously with very high precision and accuracy from 2009-2013 is undoubtedly very useful. But knowing what happened possibly less continuously with less precision and accuracy from 2015-2024 is also likely to be useful for something that seems to be aperiodic/irregular, especially since the changes often seem to be extreme enough that they might be observable with these other observations generally from earth based telescopes.

(I'm assuming and our article seems to suggest that once the discovery of fluctuations from Kepler data was announced in 2015 there was suddenly a lot of interest and observations so I'm putting 2015 as the starting but we could put 2017 if people prefer. And to be clear since our article stops at 2019, readers won't know for sure if there have been more observations whatever their quality but I strongly suspect there will be many like me who expect a reasonable number of observations continued. And so the longer time passes since 2013/2015, the more this statement is going to seem weird.)

To put it a different way, even if you didn't have precision to 0.001 magnitude, if we're talking about changes on the order of 0.1 magnitude or more then there might still be significant data available for this level of fluctuation. IIRC when I looked before the AAVSO data even if it might be fairly low quality might have been one factor in convincing more professional outfits to observe the star when there appeared to be significant fluctuations at least initially. (I don't know if Gary or others have later decide to observe enough that AAVSO data is no longer a factor in convincing others to observe it when needed.)

Our article also notes attempts to determine magnitude changes over a much longer historic time periods and while it notes the limitations with these approaches it's not clear that these are so useless that they aren't a reasonable part of the sources of information people use to try and understand this star especially when combined with the higher quality data taken with this specific purpose from 2015 or 2017 (even if it is significantly lesser quality than data from 2009-2013).

As an aside I'd note that the discussion over this historic estimations is about 130 words and occurs in the luminosity section so the earlier word count isn't even only of stuff from 2009-2013.

I'm unlikely this further, if Bri and Renerpho want to keep an unsourced and IMO clearly confusing statement in our article, so be it.

Nil Einne (talk) 17:07, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

Sorry one final thing I realised I should have said but didn't. One article suggests it was observed with at least one space based instrument namely the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite even if only for a very short time. While this by itself might not be enough to counter Kepler being the main source, it may or may not be significant given what was observed. My above answer also simplified a bit since it was talking about length of observation. At least from my read the dips in 2018 and 2019 seem to be fairly significant. (2017 less so.) It sounds like during the 2009-2013 period there were only 2 such significant dips, at the very least this is IMO what readers of our article are going to conclude based on the info presented. If these 2018 and 2019 dips were fairly significant, and not that far off the significance of 2011 and 2013 and there were no other such significant dips in the 2009-2013 period than we can see even putting aside word count it's a bit hard to understand how the 2009-2013 is the "main source" when it's missing fairly significant information from 2018 and 2019. Nil Einne (talk) 17:41, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

One thing which just occurred to me a simple solution would be to change "main" to "original" which seems true even if it remains uncited and doesn't preclude it also being the "main" as Bri believes. Also I forgot that our article also mentions the efforts of the discoverer to use the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network implying to me that she at least felt this wasn't as useless as has been suggested. Also it sounds like the 2019, observations whatever their quality were quite useful in providing information to help test the theory of a 1574 day periodicity. And while our article doesn't provide any info on this I'm assuming many readers like me might think observations around 7 February 2024 would also have provided further info on the theory. And in 2028 it's likely we'd have yet another data point whatever the quality that didn't come from Kepler..... Nil Einne (talk) 18:18, 16 October 2024 (UTC)

main name of the object

I think the main name should be Boyajian's Star, not Tabby's Star. For stars named after people have generally last names are used, not first names - see Stars named after people#Names not approved by the IAU. Tabby's Star should be an alternative name. Rpoleski (talk) 10:25, 14 October 2024 (UTC)

@Rpoleski: The name was changed to "Tabby's Star" in 2019, see Talk:Tabby's Star/Archive 2#Requested move 8 September 2019. There are some arguments in that discussion that mention "Boyajian's star" as an alternative. The arguments against that have concentrated on the WP:COMMONNAME policy. If you believe that the situation has changed, or that there are arguments that have not been heard, then I suggest to start another requested move discussion. Renerpho (talk) 13:31, 14 October 2024 (UTC)