Inexplicable dimming of star. Aliens?

http://www.popsci.com.au/space/cosm...-built-by-aliens-around-a-distant-star,410514

This star is one of many observed by Kepler. Its unusual as its showing non-periodic dimming - up to 22%! Astronomers say the variability is not from the star itself, but from something getting in the way. The dimming is too large and irregular to be due to transit of a planet. The leading theory is a massive cloud of comets or asteroids. Another theory is un-natural Dyson structures!

 

This star is 1500 light years away

 

yeah something happened 1500 years ago!

lolol, and it's always aliens too.

 

Dyson Spheres are crazyballs..

 

Probably a swarm of comets

 

They sound like a grand idea until you do the maths.
Reassembling Earth into a sphere the same radius as its orbit gives a sphere 4mm thick with near no gravity.

 

Dyson proposed using all the planets in the solar system, plenty of material then.

 

Probably terrorists...

 

Not really plus there's many other issues that Dyson didn't realise e.g. it'd be unstable.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/deep-space/a11098/could-we-build-a-dyson-sphere-17110415/

A Dyson Swarm might be possible.

 

Ah, you're right!
I hadn't read up on them lately, the Wikipedia entry gives some figures that show the shell being too thin even if we used pretty much everything we could.

"Also if assuming a radius of one AU, then there may not be sufficient building material in the Solar System to construct a Dyson shell. Anders Sandberg estimates that there is 1.82×1026 kg of easily usable building material in the Solar System, enough for a 1-AU shell with a mass of 600 kg/m2—about 8–20 cm thick on average, depending on the density of the material. This includes the hard-to-access cores of the gas giants; the inner planets alone provide only 11.79×1024 kg, enough for a 1-AU shell with a mass of just 42 kg/m2.[13]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere#Dyson_shell

 

The search for a cause continues
http://www.iflscience.com/space/no-megastructure-mystery-star-gets-stranger-still

 

I'm going with the comet theory, aliens are so 2015.

 

Another successful North Korea nuclear missile test?

 

"There's a starman, waiting in the sky"

 

Comets are out..

Apparently you would need 600,000 ~200km size comets in a very unrealistic orbit. Possible but as unlikely as Dyson Spheres.

http://www.popsci.com/study-confirms-that-alien-megastructure-star-is-weird

Stars do weird things, Im assuming its something weirdly unstable with the star itself. That could be more interesting than Dyson spheres or what not.

Im assuming a culture advanced enough to build a Dyson sphere isn't going to be limited to just the material in an average inner solar system.

 

Get ready for Footfall!

 

And they have a giant flashlight!