Case Western Reserve University’s Department of Astronomy, through the support of the Arthur S. Holden, Sr. Endowment, is sponsoring the 2019-20 Frontiers of Astronomy Lecture Series. Renowned astronomers from across the country will give five free lectures throughout the year.
Tabetha Boyajian, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Louisiana State University, will give the next lecture in the series Thursday, Dec. 5, at 8 p.m. at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
Her presentation is titled “Planet Hunters and the Most Mysterious Star in the Galaxy.”
Along with the talk in the evening, Boyajian will give an astronomy colloquium Dec. 5 at 3 p.m. in Sears Library Building, Room 552.
This event will be held in cooperation with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the Cleveland Astronomical Society.
More information on the series is available online.
About the talk
The NASA Kepler Mission provided four yearlong, ultra-precise light curves for over 150,000 stars with a primary science goal of finding transiting planets. In Kepler’s field of view was KIC 8462852, a star citizen scientists identified to have unusual brightness variations. This otherwise seemingly normal F star underwent erratic and completely unpredictable dips in flux ranging from <1% to more than 20%, with each event lasting from days to weeks at a time.
In addition to this puzzling variability, the star was later discovered to undergo variable secular declines in its brightness over month, year, decade and even century-long timescales. Good explanations for the unusual light curve for KIC 8462852 have been hard to find. Various theories range from instrumental artifacts to assorted stellar, circumstellar, interstellar and solar system astrophysical scenarios, to even invoking the presence of alien technology. By considering the observational constraints, researchers find that most scenarios either have problems explaining the data in hand or invoke extraordinarily rare or contrived circumstances to occur in nature as we know it, contradicting the principle of Occam’s razor.
Boyajian will talk about the discovery, recent developments and future work planned to study this star, and show how you can follow along and help with this celestial mystery.
About the speaker
Tabetha “Tabby” Boyajian is an astrophysicist on faculty at Louisiana State University interested in the precise characterization of the stars nearest the sun, with a particular focus on those that host exoplanets. She also is a science team member of the Planet Hunters citizen science project, and the lead investigator behind the star KIC 8462852, known as “Boyajian’s Star” in her honor.