KIC 8462852 - or "Tabby's Star", or "the Alien Megastructure Star" - has been acting weird again.
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What makes this star so bizarre is that its dips in brightness don't seem to follow any obvious patterns. When planets or even comets pass in front of their stars, it tends to happen at regular, predictable intervals and they usually block out the same amount of a star's light as the last time they made a pass. But the dips seen in the brightness of KIC 8462852 don't occur on a very tight schedule and they vary in how much they dim the star's light: anywhere from three to more than 20 percent.
To make things even weirder, old observations of the star show it has also dimmed slowly over the course of the past century. So in addition to these odd short term dips where something seems to pass in front of the star, it's also getting noticeably less bright over the long term, as if someone is turning down its energy output like you might with your living room lights using a dimmer switch. We just don't see many, if any, other stars behaving this way.
So back to the latest observations: by May 19, the light seen from KIC 8462853 had dropped by as much as 3 percent over a period of around 24 hours.
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https://www.cnet.com/news/kic-846285...ti-star-space/