One of the University’s newest faculty members is spearheading a mission to solve the mystery surrounding KIC 8462852, a star exhibiting unusual light patterns.
Assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University Tabetha Boyajian was the lead author of “Where’s the Flux?”, a research paper exploring the unusual light pattern of KIC 8462852. The team’s findings were published while Boyajian was conducting a post-doctoral fellowship at Yale University in 2015.
While Boyajian investigated the star, she didn’t actually discover it. She credits “Planet Hunters,” a part of the Citizen Science Alliance, for noticing the fluctuating data in the star’s light curve.
In Planet Hunters, more than 300,000 regular science enthusiasts are able to take part in research by observing data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft in order to discover exoplanets. The Planet Hunters monitor the drops in light of host stars, usually due to their orbiting extrasolar planets, and relies on human pattern recognition rather than a computer.
Boyajian said a machine would never have found KIC 8462852, simply because it wasn’t looking for it.
“It would be sitting there in the data set for decades forever because nobody was really looking for something like that,” she said. “It took the human eye to recognize it and say, ‘Hey, that’s different.’”
When the citizen observers were monitoring the brightness of certain stars, they noticed a giant drop in this star’s light, which couldn’t be attributed to an exoplanet. The light curve exhibited large dips, so much so that Boyajian originally thought the data was faulty. Whatever is blocking the star’s light has an area more than 1,000 times the area of Earth, Boyajian said in her February TED Talk.
In her talk, Boyajian dubbed the KIC 8462852 “the most mysterious star in the universe.”
The star doesn’t fit a normal classification, and researchers still don’t have a physical explanation for the dips in light. Boyajian and the Planet Hunters are still studying it, but don’t see finding a conclusive answer for a number of years.
In “Where’s the Flux?” Boyajian and her colleagues detail more than a dozen different theories that could explain the light curve, such as a collision between two planets or a protoplanetary debris disk. Boyajian said the most consistent theory was that a swarm of comets could be blocking the star’s light.
One of Boyajian’s colleagues, professor Jason Wright, discussed the star in his paper on alien megastructures. Wright and Boyajian co-wrote a proposal to observe the star in a study for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, which was leaked to the press. Once people thought extraterrestrial life could be linked to Tabby’s Star, news of the star grew in popularity, according to Boyajian.
Wright is also responsible for KIC 8462852 becoming known as “Tabby’s Star,” as he called it that in a press interview and the name stuck, according to Boyajian.
Tyler Ellis, a graduate student in physics and astronomy, is conducting research with Boyajian.
“I don’t think this is super relevant in terms of are we the only bits of life in the universe,” Ellis said. “But I like this star because this is something no other star of this type does without a normal explanation. It’s a mystery.”
Ellis said he doesn’t think they’ll have a probable answer on the star for a decade.
Boyajian likened the star’s dips in light to a waiting game. The dips aren’t periodic, so researchers have to wait for the light curve to change again before they can study what the object could be.
This is Boyajian’s first semester at the University. She is conducting other research projects in addition to her study of Tabby’s Star, including an observational program to learn and study about the fundamental properties of stars that has been in the works for more than ten years.

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Ryan McCarble

Tyler Ellis, a graduate student studying physics and astronomy, discusses the recently discovered "Tabby's Star" on October 3, 2016 in Nicholson Hall.