Star

And in my career, I really had always hoped for this kind of breaking news.

This is just like the speech I gave for Tabby's Star, right? Which, by the way, is still every bit as much Tabby's Star as it was.

NASA has a theory, as we mentioned a long time ago, about comets, but that's all it is, a theory.

They still don't know any more than they knew before about whether they're megastructures or not.

Let me be clear.

Possible alien life.

This, uh, one from Parkes Telescope is a biggie, just as Tabby's Star is a biggie.

So, you know, we're talking about serious stuff here.

It may seem like a fairly ordinary subject, but even the most familiar things are made up of countless small details.

We will begin with what a star actually is, and the simple light it sends across the dark, continue through why stars twinkle, why they come in different colours, and the shapes people have seen in them, and eventually reach the distances, the lifetimes and the quiet science that most people never stop to consider.

along the way we will notice the simple processes forgotten history and mildly unusual facts that usually pass without much attention there's no need to remember everything for now we can simply begin with the first quiet fact a star is a point of light in the night sky that is the simplest possible way to put it step outside after the sun has gone down wait for your eyes to adjust and there they are tiny pinpricks scattered overhead Stars appear when darkness falls.

They are not arriving from somewhere else.

They are always there, of course.

So the sky is not uniform in its starlight.

It is a mix of bold points and subtle ones, scattered without any obvious organising principle, at least not at first glance.

Stars are one of the most familiar sights above us.

That was the first sighting." "You've got contacts in Washington," Purdy went on.

"Start at the Pentagon first.

They know we're working on it.

Sam Bole, the first man on this job, was down there for a day or two." "What did he find out?" "Simonton told him the saucers were bunk.

[instrumental music] The American Broadcasting Company presents Quiet Please, which is written and directed by Willis Cooper and which features Ernest Chappell.

Quiet Please for today is called Other Side of the Stars.

[instrumental music] I remember Mount Wilson and the hundred-inch telescope, and I remember the astronomer Van Dyck and the little house of galvanized iron on the very edge of the summit.

That was the house that had nothing inside it, the absence of everything.

Yeah, well, let's get on.

That time's a-wasting there.

There wasn't any gold and there wasn't any silver in the Well of the Stars.

You found that out right away.

Hey everybody, it's David.

So I've just come back from a two week vacation, but whilst I was away, some news broke that I wanted to share with you about one of the most mysterious stars in the galaxy, KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby's Star.

This star has become immediate darling and an object of great public interest ever since its discovery last year by Tabitha Boyajian, hence the name Tabby's Star.

You might have also heard it called the WTF star, which of course means, where's the flux? right? The fascination with this object started when astronomers looked at NASA's Kepler data and they noticed that the brightness of this star changes in a way unlike any of the previously seen.

You can see here the shape of the light curve and in particular these very deep, prolonged and highly structured dips in starlight cannot be explained by conventional models.

What promoted this star from being a mere astronomical curiosity to an object of intense public interest was when Professor Jason Wright, in an interview with The Atlantic, pointed out that some of the features observed resemble the types of features you might expect from an alien megastructure.

Now, if you haven't already seen it, you can click here for Jason's Cool Worlds video, where he will give you his take about Tabby's Star.

Now, no professional astronomers, and least of all Jason Wright, are claiming this is the discovery or detection of an alien megastructure.