If you believe science is demystifying the universe, consider Tabby’s star, widely hailed as the weirdest sun in the galaxy. “As far as I can tell,” MIT-trained astronomer Matt Muterspaugh said recently, “Every telescope that can look at it right now is looking at it right now.”
Named after Tabetha Boyajian, an astrophysicist at Louisiana State University, the super-strange object located in the constellation Cygnus was unexpectedly discovered in 2009 in photographs taken by the powerful Kepler space telescope. Planet hunters, an online army of volunteer citizen-astronomers, were combing the photos for evidence of extraterrestrial, Earth-like worlds – so-called exoplanets.
Out of more than 150,000 stars, this particular one caught their eye because of the occasional, pronounced, and inexplicable dips in its brightness. Every star, including our own sun, shines inconstantly, but typically the variabilities are subtle. Not so with this object – initially labeled KIC 8462852 – so the planet hunters promptly alerted a team of professional astronomers led by Boyajian, who back then was at Yale University.
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