[{"id":327,"title":"The NASA K2 Mission has yet to observe an analog of Tabby's Star","sha":"59bde655f99d29f685702717316e06f3","user_id":null,"state":"published","body":"Tabby's Star is a main sequence F-class star ([KIC 8462852](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIC_8462852)) observed by the NASA Kepler spacecraft to undergo significant aperiodic dimming activity across a four year baseline. The light curve was noted as novel amongst a pool of ~150,000 targets through visual inspection performed by participants of the [PlanetHunters.org](https://www.planethunters.org/) project. [Boyajian, et al. (2015)](http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03622) reported an analysis which attempted to model the enigmatic behavior under various scenarios, with a swarm of exo-comets offered as a potential (but problematic) leading explanation. Subsequent follow-up studies failed to detect a significant IR excess or the presence of close stellar companions. [Wright, et al. (2015)](http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04606) offered an alternative explanation invoking transits of alien-megastructures, which may not produce a detectable IR excess or radial velocity signal. \r\n\r\nTo date, a robust model to explain the behavior of Tabby's Star remains elusive.\r\n\r\nThe Kepler spacecraft is now observing a series of new ecliptic fields ([K2](http://keplerscience.arc.nasa.gov/)) and has accumulated observations of ~165,000 additional targets. Continued visual inspection of these public data has failed to recover an analog to KIC 8462852. Lack of such a detection suggests that the aperiodic dimming indeed represents a rare astrophysical phenomenon, regardless of the true root cause mechanism involved. Future photometric surveys by K2 and TESS will offer additional opportunity to search for such analogs.\r\n\r\n","created_at":"2016-08-04T03:36:28.126Z","updated_at":"2016-08-15T21:57:38.941Z","zenodo_id":143398,"doi":"http://dx.doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.59494","subject":null,"tags":["astronomy","kepler","astrophysics","crowdsourcing"],"vote_count":2,"view_count":1,"score":3.1,"deleted":false,"muted":false,"tweeted":true,"attachment_file_name":"8462852_LC_img.png","attachment_content_type":"image/png","attachment_file_size":145799,"attachment_updated_at":"2016-08-04T03:36:58.456Z"}]