KIC 8462852 has faded ~20% in brightness from 1890 to 1989

[EPW]

A superadvanced alien race only 1,500 lightyears away does seem unlikely. Why wouldn't they be on Earth already?

[Proteus_MST]

A superadvanced alien race only 1,500 lightyears away does seem unlikely. Why wouldn't they be on Earth already?

Why would they?
Even with "just" 1500 ly the sol system is rather far away and there are much better reachable stars in their vicinity ... and even if they have a SETI program, they won't receive any signals from the sol system (after all signals travel only with lightspeed ... i.e. if they were able to look at earth they would see earthj in the 6th century ... but actually the distance, 1500 ly, is so large that any signals we send out will most probably be too dim to be received at KIC 8462852, thanks to the inverse square law)
So, the sol system will most likely just one system of many for them (well, a system with a rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone, if they have instruments fine enough to discover it ...but it seems like such systems are much less rare than astronomers originally thought ... and they will become even less rare when astronomers develope even better instruments than we have available today)

And if the hypothetical KIC 8462852 aliens don't have developed some kind of warp engine, their spaceships and probes will most likely travel at sublight speeds, requiring hem to build generation ships and be more than 1500 years underway, if they want to get to earth

[Jon Miller]

Being 'advanced' doesn't mean that passing the speed of light is possible.

JM

[EPW]

Why would they?
Even with "just" 1500 ly the sol system is rather far away and there are much better reachable stars in their vicinity ... and even if they have a SETI program, they won't receive any signals from the sol system (after all signals travel only with lightspeed ... i.e. if they were able to look at earth they would see earthj in the 6th century ... but actually the distance, 1500 ly, is so large that any signals we send out will most probably be too dim to be received at KIC 8462852, thanks to the inverse square law)
So, the sol system will most likely just one system of many for them (well, a system with a rocky planet in the Goldilocks zone, if they have instruments fine enough to discover it ...but it seems like such systems are much less rare than astronomers originally thought ... and they will become even less rare when astronomers develope even better instruments than we have available today)

And if the hypothetical KIC 8462852 aliens don't have developed some kind of warp engine, their spaceships and probes will most likely travel at sublight speeds, requiring hem to build generation ships and be more than 1500 years underway, if they want to get to earth

I'm assuming generation ships(or just probes) would be much easier to build than a Dyson Sphere. I mean, doesn't it make sense to send out 100,000 small probes to all systems with possibly habitable planets? If they're 20,000 years more advanced than us(for example) they could have sent out such probes ages ago.

[Lorizael]

This wouldn't explain the findings however, that KIC 8462852 not only shows periodical dimmings, but that also his total brightness decreases more and more. With ~0.37 mag / century

I wouldn't normally do this, but you used Real Astronomer terms so I am forced to be an astronomical pedant. The star has not decreased in brightness by 0.37 magnitudes over the last century. Because magnitude is a logarithmic scale, a change of 0.37 mag (always) represents about a 29% decrease in brightness. What the most recent paper shows is that if the star's observed decrease in brightness were extrapolated over a century, it would amount to a 0.37 mag change. They remark upon this because that would be a greater rate of decline than the supposed decline measured over the last century in the earlier, controversial paper. But Kepler hasn't actually seen it decline that much. And because magnitude is logarithmic, it's not really accurate to say that the rate is 0.37 mag/century, because a linear change in magnitude does not correspond to a linear change in brightness (which is what Kepler actually observed).

[Ben Kenobi]

Lori, that instability looks to me like it's chaotic. Are there any evolutionary changes that could prompt that? I see it's an FV class star which is bizarre. It shouldn't be exhibiting instability.

[Dinner]

Perhaps a cloud of gas and dust passing between that star and us?

[Uncle Sparky]

Borg collective?

[Aeson]

Every time it reads one of my posts it gets a bit dimmer.

[Berzerker]

“It was already pretty contrived to invoke a swarm of comets to explain the data,”

thats how we got our Oort Cloud

[Lorizael]

Spoken like a man who's never read Jan Oort's 1950 paper.

[Berzerker]

what did his paper say?

did he invoke a swarm of comets to explain the data?

[Uncle Sparky]

Spoken like a man who's never read Jan Oort's 1950 paper.

what did his paper say?

From the Desk of Jan Oort...

and then some other stuff in Dutch.

[Lorizael]

what did his paper say?

did he invoke a swarm of comets to explain the data?

Read and find out. It might help to have even the barest grasp of the fundamentals of a field before making wild proclamations about it.

[Berzerker]

I didn't mention him or his paper... I said the Oort Cloud was invoked to explain the data. Am I wrong? Prove it, insults dont impress me and so far thats all you've posted.