What Could Be Going on with Boyajian’s Star? Part VIII: Alien Megastrutures

If you’re looking for a guide to this series, click here.

Last time I tried to wrap up circumstellar solutions, but before moving on to intrinsic variations, it’s clear I need to address the megastruture in the room.

Hypothesis 9) Alien Megastructures

Background on this hypothesis is here, and here:

Now, I can’t give this hypothesis the treatment I’ve given the others, because, even compared to the vague, general families of solutions in the previous hypotheses, this one has very little to hang any physics on. Ancient alien civilizations could be arbitrarily advanced, and so it’s not clear what physics we’re allowed to assume. We don’t know why they would create megastructures (though energy collection seems like a good guess to me) so we have no good reason to expect any particular shape or size for them.

That said, we can build up a straw man model, and see how well it holds up.

But first, let’s dispense with some unnecessarily complicated ideas. Lintott & Simmons made me smile with their article in the Journal of Brief Ideas in which they used the timescale of secular dimming to estimate the construction time for a Dyson sphere. Similarly, Villaroel et al. skeptically mentioned this possibility in their paper.

But we don’t have to imagine building a gigantic sphere in a century to hypothesize how megastructures could explain the dimming.

Imagine that it is advantageous to collect solar energy to be used for some purpose, and that there is enough material to do so, but not an infinite supply.  Imagine that the panels have a range of sizes and orbit the star in a range of orbital periods.  In this case, the cost (in time, energy, and mass) to construct a panel is balanced by the benefit (the energy intercepted, which favors close-in panels, times the efficiency of the panels, which favors far-out panels). If too many such panels are created, the close-in ones will shadow the farther-out ones, reducing their efficiency.

In this toy model, one expects (in a rough order-of-magnitude sense) to end up with a swarm of panels that have an optical depth near 1. That is, they should not capture, say 99.999% of the photons, because the marginal efficiency of the next panel is reduced by a factor of 100,000 compared to the first one.  And they shouldn’t intercept only 0.001% of the light, because 99.999% of the light still free to take with virtually zero efficiency hit. You’d expect somewhere between, say, 10% and 90% of the light to get absorbed.

The smaller panels will appear as a translucent fluid around the star, constantly blocking some fraction between 10-90% of the light, roughly speaking. This fraction will vary as denser parts of the swarm come into and out of view, and as chance alignments of parts of the swarms at different orbital distances align. We might see variations in brightness on scales from hours to centuries. Particularly large panels—even bigger, perhaps, than the star itself—will cause large, discrete dips as they transit, with profiles according to their shape. The timescale for crossing may not be a good indicator of their distance from the star, because they might be so thin that radiation pressure is important (see the appendix here).

This is actually right in line with the observations of Boyajian’s Star: we see a constant dimming of the star, one that erratically has increased by about 15% in the past 115 years, and occasional dips.

OK, so how does the toy model hold up against long-wavelength observations?  Well, not great. The balance of efficiency with orbital distance is trickier, and interacts with the shadowing argument, but you might expect there to be a typical, characteristic temperature that is around 150K (95% maximum efficiency for a star like the Sun—we argued all of this in more detail in our paper here).

The long-wavelength constraints apply almost as well to megastructures as they do to dust. We argued in that paper that it is reasonable to expect nearly all of the energy  collected to be reradiated as waste heat.  As we saw from the long-wavelength limits, it just can’t be that 15% of the starlight is being reprocessed at 150K, or at any other temperature:

Spectral energy distribution of Boyajian's Star, with arrows indicating upper limits. The right-most measurements are from Thompson et al. They rule out big clouds of dust blocking 15% of the star's light in all directions, because the dust would reradiate at levels easy to detect.

Spectral energy distribution of Boyajian’s Star, with arrows indicating upper limits. The right-most measurements are from Thompson et al. They rule out big clouds of megastructures blocking and reradiating 15% of the star’s light in all directions (black line) at 65K, because the heat would be easy to detect.  Other temperatures are actually in worse agreement with the data.

The black line is our toy model swarm blocking 15% of the light, and it is strongly inconsistent with the red upper limits from WISE and Thompson et al.

Now, there are a couple of ways out.  First, the aliens might be doing some non-dissipative work with this starlight. Perhaps they are launching interstellar probes. Perhaps they are sending out powerful laser or radio transmissions. Anything that puts all of that stellar luminosity into energy that leaves the system in a low-entropy way would reduce their waste heat luminosity.  Can that do it?

Well, if the work is all done at 65K, then the maximum (Carnot) efficiency allowed by thermodynamics is about 99%. This means that they could reduce their long-wavelength luminosity down from 15% of the star’s, to only 0.15%.  The upper limit at this temperature, as you can see in the figure above, is 0.2% (the purple line).

So… not completely ruled out, yet, but I’d have to say we’re close enough that I’d put this one down as very unlikely, even after normalizing for the unknown chance that there are megastructures there in the first place.

Another way out is that it’s not a spherical swarm. Make it an edge-on ring, and you can further reduce the waste heat. Make them radiate towards their ecliptic poles, and you can reduce it further. Turn the energy into low entropy radiation at high efficiency and do both of the above, and they’d be nigh undetectable.

So you see, the hypothesis is sufficiently flexible that it can fit almost any observations, but I do think we can say this about the vanilla, simplest, strawman scenarios:

  1. IR/mm observations rule out a spherical swarm doing only dissipative work (like humanity does) being responsible for the long-term dimming
  2. We can further rule out a spherical swarm sending the energy off in another way at maximum efficiency with temperatures above ~90K
  3. We can lower this cut-off temperature with more sensitive measurements

So, subjective verdict: unclear, with an extra multiplier of very unlikely for the simplest spherical swarm strawman.

The megastructure hypothesis would find support if Gaia shows us that the star is actually much more extinguished than the reddening suggests (meaning there is a significant optical depth of geometric absorbers: the swarm of solar panels).  Or if, you know, we detect those radio waves that all those panels are producing!

OK, next time: back to the natural explanations, this time looking at intrinsic variability.

9 thoughts on “What Could Be Going on with Boyajian’s Star? Part VIII: Alien Megastrutures

  1. dryson

    Here’s Why Astronomers Are So Worried About SpaceX’s Planned ‘Megaconstellation’

    The first is that none of the telescopes collecting data from the sky are prepared to deal with this many bright, artificial dots flitting across their fields of view.
    “When we develop new, big facilities, big observatories, big surveys to go and do things like discover hazardous asteroids, we design them to within an inch of their lives. We do so to make sure that every [risk] is accounted for,” he said. “This is one of those confounding factors that, generally speaking, we haven’t prepared for because it hasn’t been an issue up ‘til now.”

    Machine Learning could be used to collect the amount of sunlight blocked by each car and the amount of sunlight that passes between each car to create a refined learning process for the telescope looking at a star with a transiting planet or transiting object.

    Because ML learns from itself unlike a telescope, the data collected from observing the Starlink Train could then be super imposed over a light curve. As the ML scans the light curve of a transiting object it would be learning the new light curve while searching for data that would suggest smaller objects orbiting the sun were present based on the data that it collected from observing the Starlink Train.

    Since ML can be trained to learn based on a layered approach and smaller objects, such as Dyson Satellites orbiting a sun, would block and allow smaller amounts of light by each car as the train passes between the sun and telescope, then ML should be able too quickly refine objects present in the light curve that would normally be missed by simple light curve data observation telescope.

    The light curve of the StarLink train would be considerable smaller than a transiting planet and even very large asteroid or swarm of asteroids, but training ML to dig deep within the light curve itself will be a fundamental leap forward for Astronomy.

    https://www.space.com/spacex-astronomers-starlink.html

  2. Dryson

    Since KIC 8462 does not have an observable wobble which would suggest a Jupiter sized or larger sized planet is orbiting KIC 8462 but a smaller planet might still be present. From what I have read about the wobble of a star is that an Earth sized planet might not cause the wobble but a Jupiter sized planet could cause an Earth sized planet to itself wobble in its orbit around the sun.

    What might be taking place place at KIC 8462 is that because the sun exhibits a similar dim in it’s light curve to that of a YSO Dipper is that the star itself might be experiencing an age reduction to a YSO Dipper age star as well as possibly having planets orbiting it.

    Age reduction of a star to a YSO Dipper star could be the result of the sun’s core producing elements that would cause the star to dim as if the star was a YSO.

    If its not possible for KIC 8462 to present itself as a YSO sun in any manner at all and the light curve is not caused by planets wobbling around KIC 8462 that might cause the dims to occur and all other known natural interactions are not possible then only two possibilities remain.

    Aliens and a new theory.

    I recently watched a video discussing the Cold Atom Lab and how it will be possible to freeze an atom to the point of no energetic reactions taking place from within the atom. Perhaps there is a region of space between Earth and KIC 8462 that is similar to the environment within CAL that causes atoms in the space around KIC 8462 to be frozen to a point of producing either almost no energy or a reduced amount of energy that could explain the light curve variances of KIC 8462.

  3. Harry R Ray

    Dr Wright: Have you read Jose Solarzano’s new post “Where’s the Fuzz? The o.88-Day Periodicity of Boyajian’s Star Goes Away at Key Times”. on the Science 2.0 website? My own opinion is that his arguements mesh very well with yours and Dr. Siggurdsson’s, but, he also presents a scenario to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, the existance of Megastructures with just light curves alone.

  4. Coacervate

    converting starlight to antimatter. everyone wants antimatter and it explains the missing reradiated heat

  5. larry

    If there is a megastructure, then at the assumed distance of the star, it ought to be on the order of a milliarcsecond across. Do we have any observational techniques that could rule out (or in) the existence of an object that size? I assume if there is no structure we would just see the star as an unresolved point.

  6. jtw13 Post author

    It’s true that if the star has significant oblateness, then it can torque material in inclined orbits. If the material acts as a dissipative fluid (like a gas disk), then this can align it with the star.

    The strength of this torque goes down quickly with orbital distance, though. Also, there may be other forces acting on orbital material that maintain its inclination.

  7. eric

    Sorry to repeat myself, but here goes as it seems to apply here as well as in your Part 2:

    An edge on ring…. seems to work as it explains the long term and short term dimmings along with the lack of excess IR…. BUT…. considering that the star’s pole is tipped to our line of sight about 70 degrees, then this disk is not in orbit around Tabby’s equator. Is that even stable? The star spins fast, 0.88 days and must have an equatorial bulge. Tidal forces from this bulge should force the disc, no matter where or how it formed, into an equatorial orbit after disrupting it, and no longer edge on to us.

    Perhaps this off-axis ring is stable but only for, lets say, 1 billion years? The perhaps…. we have the star’s age wrong, it’s not middle aged but very young. A thin, left over and edge-on accretion disc, maybe even forming planets, etc.

    Thanks again for this great running summary.

  8. jtw13 Post author

    I imagine a spherical swarm is more natural and useful, because there’s less shadowing. I imagine avoiding collisions is not hard (see, air traffic control).

  9. sam

    Assuming artificial megastructures are a thing and they’re used for energy collection (as well as maybe computation or habitation) have you given any thought to why an edge-on ring swarm might be a preferable (or less preferable) configuration than a spherical swarm?

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *