The star KIC 8462852 , also known by the name ” Tabby’s star “, or more appropriately, ” Boyajian star ” (following the principal investigator involved in its discovery and analysis, Dr. Tabetha Boyajian), is a fascinating object stellar that has undoubtedly attracted the attention of the scientific community. It has become a major media phenomenon and even has its own website and its own TED talk.
This star was originally “hunted” by the citizen science project “Planet Hunters” ( “Planet Hunters”). This project includes a web application from which anyone can spend their time searching for exoplanets manually using the transits method. This method is based on the presence of a small decrease in the brightness of a star, which can occur when a planet “transits” in front of it. The reason that the analysis of luminosity curves has been left open to anyone with a little time and patience is based on the fact that automatic systems do not always succeed in the correct classification of traffic events. Like everything in life, in the search for “new Earths”, sometimes there is nothing like touch and, in this case, the human eye. The application we were talking about includes a quick tutorial from which a science enthusiast can start hunting exoplanets within seconds of accessing the Planet Hunters website.
TheKIC 8462852it is especially striking for its famous brightness losses of an unknown nature, measured by the Keppler satellite. These decreases in brightness, or pseudo-transits, are mysterious due to their asymmetries, their temporal and intensity incoherence, unique in the still brief history of thesearch for exoplanets.Many theories have been proposed and consequently discarded: from the most plausible and scientifically based (the presence of a companion star, floating debris disks that partially eclipse the light that reaches us, etc.), to the most extravagant and eccentric (such as the presence of an alien megastructure for energy production, for example).
To deepen the resolution of this mystery related to the“Tabby Sun”From a research group at the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), a proposal has been launched (and approved) to dedicate time to observe the Mercator telescope and the HERMES spectrograph. The objective is to reconstruct the surface heat map of the star thanks to the Doppler variations caused by its own rotation. After all, this analysis represents a 3D scan of the star (such as can be obtained from a patient undergoing a PET scan). This will allowSettle points of different temperatures and even “cold spots” or “cold spots”.By tracking these zones of “less warm” flow in its chromosphere, it will be possible to calculate its radial velocity with precision and compare it with that estimated by the Kepler mission (just under one Earth day).
The members of this group of scientists are, among others, astrophysicists Marian Martínez (@ 79ronja), Héctor Socas (@hsocasnavarro) and Carlos Westendorp (@cwestend). In addition, the three are the hosts of the famous popular science podcast CoffeeBreak: Signal and Noise (@pcoffeebreak). The observation period will take place between the end of April and the month of May. We wish you all the best and that your work contributes to the clarification of this “galactic hieroglyph”.
Alberto Corbí Bellot is a professor at the Higher School of Engineering and Technology (ESIT) – International University of La Rioja (UNIR) and the Institute for Educational Research, Innovation and Technology (iTED)
