Dyson Sphere - what is it for? Part III: Using the Dyson Ring and Individual Elements
Having considered in the first part of the article the history of the Dyson sphere and having determined the simplest and most practical version of its structure in the form of a non-rigid Dyson Ring, I devoted the second part of the article to a detailed analysis of the design of such a Ring from separate (moderately giant) autonomous elements. The design of the rather primitive autonomous element of the Ring was described there in detail, its approximate weight and parameters of the entire Ring for two radii were calculated.
Now you can get to the point: Why can you apply such a non-rigid Ring of individual autonomous elements?
')
First, as already described above, each hexagonal (or octagonal) element of the Ring with a hermetic central module is itself a base for obtaining energy + or an autonomous colony for several hundred or thousand people (with food production), embodying Tsiolkovsky's dreams about the “ethereal cities”, or a plant for processing mineral resources (energy-intensive production of materials) and / or a station for producing fuel (in the form of a pair of oxygen / hydrogen, plus other gases for different engines, and enrichment from heating systems for nuclear and thermonuclear reactions).
Secondly, each element of the Ring can change the tilt of its mirror to the direction to the Sun and redirect its “bunny” of reflected sunlight to where it should go: to other elements, to the Earth, to a spacecraft or to an asteroid that needs to be lit, heated, evaporate, develop. This is energy, and weapons, and the signal - any of the list. Something similar is shown at the beginning (from 10 to 50 seconds) of this video.
Thirdly, the energy extracted at the element can be redirected from the element: by cables to the adjacent elements of the ring, by laser or HF radio beams to receiving stations within the ring, or to asteroids or to spacecraft (as a last resort, and directly to satellites and planets).
Fourth, all the improvements described above, as well as the projects for the modernization of the Ring that are inaccessible even to our imagination, will be carried out on the basis of the original Ring, using its capabilities and materials, and taking into account the invaluable experience of its construction.
Examples of the use of individual elements
1. Should a satellite or an asteroid (comet) be vaporized or moved out of orbit? At the desired point deliver one or more elements of the Ring, which, with their “bunnies” of reflected light (and with the addition of other radiation), heat the object for a long time and persistently.
Often there are such objections: the creation of a huge swarm of elements is supposedly spraying and squandering the resources of the solar system. But in addition to the working fluid spent on the delivery of an unfinished element and supplies to a stable orbit, nothing from the system disappears or disappears. All elements, if desired, can be transformed into something else, to build on their base something new and perfect. It's easier than extracting material from scratch. The following three examples of this:
2. Need to signal the light years to another system? Or get a weak signal from afar? Here elements of the Ring will be useful: each element is an antenna itself, you can assemble several elements of the Ring into a parabolic or spherical antenna, turn it in the right direction and add a radiating / receiving device to the focus.
3. Do you need to collect a huge ship-ark in order to reach the neighboring star (at a speed much slower than the speed of light) for hundreds of years? Elements of the Ring are easier to disassemble and recycle on the spot in the ship, rather than build a ship from scratch.
4. Need to assemble a huge ship with a solar sail? You can take one or more elements of the Ring and build something like a slow ship flying in the solar wind, in addition to the impulse of other engines.
5. Do you need to accelerate a smaller ship using an external energy source? This can be done by directing laser or other rays (light, RF radio) from the Ring elements to the receiving antenna of the ship (the energy received there will then be directed to ion / plasma or other engines), or to a reflecting mirror (photon rocket) - photon thrust.
Acceleration of the probe with a laser beam
The latter term quite loudly sounded as quite feasible in the next 30-50 years the idea of ​​the project DEEP-IN ( Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration ), promoted by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and especially Philip Lubin (since 2013) https: // arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.01356.pdf .
By the way, a similar idea of ​​interstellar travel was expressed in 1984 by Robert Forward (now his designs are called the traditional schemes of the solar sailboats of Matloff and Forward ). The new idea about the acceleration of ultra-low (grams in) interstellar probes with thin and small (about 1 m in diameter) light sails of super-power ground and orbital (located in space) arrays of lasers caused a great resonance and serious discussions. In principle, with the resolution of many technical problems, the main one being laser ablation of the sail material, such a system could zapurnut mini-probe into the interstellar space with speeds of course not 20%, but at least about 5% of the speed of light. The idea of ​​the project is based on Philip Lubin ’s article “A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight” with a project plan that the author sent to the JBIS scientific journal: Journal of the British Interplanetary Society as early as April 2015, and the last edition was dated September 2016 . By the way, in this presentation , on slide 44, Lubin addresses the idea of ​​the Dyson sphere and the problems of finding such structures.
There are several huge objections to the feasibility of the project (almost immediately voiced by critics, for example, briefly and in the case here http://trv-science.ru/2016/04/19/dvojka-po-fizike/ - continued: http: // trv -science.ru/2016/05/17/pod-zvezdnym-parusom-k-alpha-centauri/ ). Thus, the DEEP-IN project states that laser arrays for such acceleration can be located in near-earth orbits (to avoid absorption of the laser by the atmosphere, self-focusing of the beam) or even on Earth in a high and dry place (in the presentation video). And supposedly from there they would quickly and quickly disperse the probe to the desired speed.
The problem is that it is impossible to accelerate such a mini-probe with a small sail too quickly - acceleration will break it, it is also impossible to illuminate a thin sail with an excessively powerful laser beam - heating will melt the sail or blow it through during the ablation of the material from radiation. You need to accelerate the probe slowly and not too powerful laser.
However, with slow acceleration of the probe, another serious problem arises with the laser beam: since any laser has a divergence (divergence) of the beam, the beam diverges with the distance. The angle of divergence of the beam is usually equal to: θ = 1.22λ / d , where λ is the wavelength, d is the diameter of the beam (the diameter of the laser outlet). The discrepancy for conventional (narrow-aperture) lasers is approximately 1 angular minute. This means that the laser beam on the moon will already be about 2 km in diameter, and beyond the orbit of Mars it is already hundreds of kilometers! ( more info here ). Illumination of a sail of a minizonda at such distances with such a weak, scattered beam will be almost useless for its acceleration - slow acceleration will break beyond the orbit of the Moon.
But the authors of the project have high hopes for the phase-controlled radiation arrays of small erbium (Yb) fiber lasers (efficiency up to 78%) with a phase control device. In some ways, the idea of ​​such an array of lasers resembles the idea of ​​a radar with an active phased antenna array: like elements of a phased antenna array, lasers must change the relative phases of their radiation in a complex way so that it is amplified in one desired direction and suppressed in all other directions ( Ideally). An important positive detail for the feasibility of the project is the serious progress of such fiber lasers in recent years - progress in both power and compactness (there is a decrease in size according to Moore's law) and in price. About 20 million phase-matched small fiber kilowatt Yb lasers weighing 25-30 kg with an efficiency of about 50% and with a short wavelength (in the region of 1 micron or 1060 nm) can be placed on a 1-by-1 field to get the output laser radiation of tens of Gigawatts - the so-called DE-STAR 4 array. It is stated that the beam diverging angle of such an array will be: θ = 1.22λ / d = 10 ^ -9 radians = 0.0002 arcseconds, since d here will be about 1000 However, it is the linear dimensions and the mass of such a grating that make the authors of the project choose from the lasers terrestrial accommodation that leads to problems with the atmosphere on the beam path.
And the problem of pointing the laser at such a small and remote for millions of kilometers sailing probe also remains.
But you can accelerate the mini-probe, first with an array of lasers from the Earth's orbit, then with another array on the Moon, then with the third one further away ... and so on.
And elements of the Ring (remaining in their orbits) can produce energy for such arrays of lasers, or be a platform for the installation of such lasers. To do this, they must be set up in different orbits around the Earth, at Lagrange points, in orbits around the Sun, with a radius of just over 1 AU.
Ring elements can be sent in advance to points (for example, by conventional engines or using solar wind and using illumination from other Ring elements) along the future flight path of such a probe from the Earth's orbit and even to the very edges of the Solar System. There, with energy stored in batteries and / or in fuel, the elements of the Ring will wait for the moment of the mini-probe passing by and illuminate it from behind with moderately powerful laser beams within its part of the trajectory (0.3-0.5 million km long), then transmitting the probe as follows items:
At the same time, they in turn emit energy by a beam to a mini-probe, accelerating it within the range of their beam, passing each other the accelerating ship as if on a relay.
Or a slightly more advanced option: without using the energy reserves in the batteries, but simply sending light / energy along the chain from one element to another, so that the current active element, the last to accept this energy, would direct it to the mini-probe accelerated beyond our system:
By the way, Ring elements can overclock not only such mini-probes for flights outside the system. Right from its place in the Ring, the element can accelerate and slow down the intrasystem cargo ships with solar sails when delivering cargo from and to the Ring elements (of course, this is not about high speeds). With this, you can start mastering the photon thrust, improving the techniques and methods for slow acceleration and deceleration of ships inside the solar system. In this work in 2013, the authors (including Philip Lubin) discuss in detail such intrasystem flights with braking after the ship turned around with a sail-mirror forward (ping-pong method).
Problem with ring detection from outside
The moment associated with sending signals outside (example 2. above) occurs even at the assembly stage of such a Ring. Whether the creators of the Ring want it or not, but if the Ring elements are combined into segments with characteristic dimensions of about 1 million km (the diameter of Jupiter - the largest planet of the Solar System - is about 0.14 million km, which is 7 times smaller), then any external observer , being approximately in the plane of the Ring, begins to register (regardless of the desire of the creators of the Ring) strange, previously unseen, periodic eclipses of the central luminary by a certain object, which by linear dimensions certainly exceeds the size of the giant planets. And the observer (there are more of them in the Galaxy) most likely will not notice anything in the plane of the Ring. This is an important point: there are not so many chances for a casual observer to be from the right direction from such a star.
If in this system, at given distances from the star (with given periods) no giant celestial bodies such as red or brown dwarfs, black holes, cold (non-radiating infrared background) thin dust-gas protoplanetary clouds (as described here ) are detected by available astronomical methods then this is a serious reason for the observer to think about the artificial causes of this phenomenon.
As it happened with the astronomers of the Earth, who recently with the help of the Kepler space telescope noticed periodic (once in about 750 days) and short (about a day) luminosity reduction by 10-22% of an exceptionally stable star (normal spectral type F3 V / IV) under the number KIC 8462852 ( https://geektimes.ru/post/267022/ ). She is also a Tabbi star , around which (according to observations) there are no other satellite stars (red dwarfs), no increased infrared or ultraviolet radiation, and therefore most likely there is no planetary nebula, no asteroid belts, or brown dwarfs close to the star - to put it simply, there are no natural astronomical reasons that could explain such a huge eclipse of the central star. There were versions with comets, more precisely, exo-comets ( https://geektimes.ru/post/266408/ ), an asteroid belt, or a recent collision of local exoplanets.
It should be noted that the period of eclipses of 727 days corresponds little to the characteristic periods of orbits for our system (not to mention the fact that the flight of comets near a massive star like the Sun often leads to a complete or partial disintegration of comets or to a strong change in their orbits). It is difficult to imagine such a huge (covering 1/5 of the disk of the star) and compact (covering just a day or a couple of days) a swarm of comets that manage to close 22% of the light of that star with such a strange period of 750 days from us with its cores or tails. This is discussed here .
Then a version was added (not yet dropped) with a special angle of observation of a planetary disk (cloud) with cold continuous outer layers located far around this star and blocking infrared radiation of the inner layers ( https://geektimes.ru/post/280062/ ). This, so to speak, natural analog of the man-made Ring described above sometimes overshadows a star by 15-20%. Suppose it is, it may well be. But how does this obviously very thin (but not discontinuous) disk manage to overshadow not a small star of just a day?
Recently, there was news about the processing results by two experts from the USA (Valery Makarov from the US Naval Observatory in Washington and Alexey Goldin from Teza Technology) of raw data from the Kepler space telescope with two large eclipses of this star. Among other things, they checked the position of the star relative to other objects during eclipses. The results they got were very strange - they claim that at the moment of the eclipse the star itself (more precisely, the "center of brightness" of the light from it) shifted relative to the receiving matrix of the telescope! The conclusions so far are: either Tabby's star is obstructed by some comets or planetoids (still considerable), but not on the orbit of this star, but on the orbit of some other massive body (black hole? Brown dwarf?) Closer to us (along the line of observation), or some object of non-natural origin at KIC 8462852 itself is to blame.
The period of 727 days corresponds approximately to the parameters of the orbit in the habitable zone or outside the habitable zone for this star (it is about 1.5 times larger than the Sun, its luminosity is 4.7 times the solar one, therefore the period should be clearly more than 400-500 days).
By the way, the analysis of Leonid Ksanfomaliti from the Institute of Space Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences revealed an unusual shape of the light curve (the curve below is taken from the original article and is simply enlarged) for the two deepest dips / eclipses:
The speeds of first falling and then increasing the brightness of the star are asymmetrical, which may be evidence of the elongation of the orbits of the darkening bodies. Further, based on the shape of the curve and the duration of the coating, Xanfomality estimated the possible orbital parameters of the cosmic body causing the eclipse.
Astronomers at the next eclipse (in 2017) would be useful to calculate the shape of the objects eclipsed by the exact graph of the fall and rise of the luminosity of the Tabbi star, especially since this technique is: ( http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503580 ) . There are also methods for determining the angle / direction of the intersection of a star's disk with an object like a planet:
If the shape of these objects turns out to be not round, for example, square or triangular, then this is already an obvious indication of the artificial origin of the eclipsing objects.
By the way, the “small ripples” of eclipses of the Tabbi star in principle fit the effect of the unfinished elements of the swarm obscuring the light of this star, and large eclipses every 750 days can be caused by the swarm’s super-elements that have been completed to gigantic sizes (or by combining many small elements).
Findings:
The arguments cited above in this article suggest that any advanced civilization of a technical type, with the desire and will to expand its presence in space using space resources, will most likely build some sort of Dyson type I discontinuous sphere (in the form of Roy Dyson), using it is not so much for the increase of habitable places (although it is possible to live somehow on such elements), but for two main purposes:
In addition, such a civilization will receive two or three other nice bonuses:
I hope that the above arguments for the construction are not at all Dyson's sphere, but rather Roy in the form of Dyson's Ring were quite convincing. I want to believe that with the development of real development (and not studying, as they say now) of our solar system, sometime these or similar arguments will convince our descendants to build just such a variant of the Dyson sphere in the form of a non-rigid Ring. I am sure that more advanced civilizations in our galaxy were already convinced by similar arguments many thousands of years ago and now they are simply busy with the work that they have been stretching for many thousands of years, to which they undoubtedly were ready from the very beginning of construction.
Now you can get to the point: Why can you apply such a non-rigid Ring of individual autonomous elements?
')
First, as already described above, each hexagonal (or octagonal) element of the Ring with a hermetic central module is itself a base for obtaining energy + or an autonomous colony for several hundred or thousand people (with food production), embodying Tsiolkovsky's dreams about the “ethereal cities”, or a plant for processing mineral resources (energy-intensive production of materials) and / or a station for producing fuel (in the form of a pair of oxygen / hydrogen, plus other gases for different engines, and enrichment from heating systems for nuclear and thermonuclear reactions).
Secondly, each element of the Ring can change the tilt of its mirror to the direction to the Sun and redirect its “bunny” of reflected sunlight to where it should go: to other elements, to the Earth, to a spacecraft or to an asteroid that needs to be lit, heated, evaporate, develop. This is energy, and weapons, and the signal - any of the list. Something similar is shown at the beginning (from 10 to 50 seconds) of this video.
Thirdly, the energy extracted at the element can be redirected from the element: by cables to the adjacent elements of the ring, by laser or HF radio beams to receiving stations within the ring, or to asteroids or to spacecraft (as a last resort, and directly to satellites and planets).
Fourth, all the improvements described above, as well as the projects for the modernization of the Ring that are inaccessible even to our imagination, will be carried out on the basis of the original Ring, using its capabilities and materials, and taking into account the invaluable experience of its construction.
Examples of the use of individual elements
1. Should a satellite or an asteroid (comet) be vaporized or moved out of orbit? At the desired point deliver one or more elements of the Ring, which, with their “bunnies” of reflected light (and with the addition of other radiation), heat the object for a long time and persistently.
Often there are such objections: the creation of a huge swarm of elements is supposedly spraying and squandering the resources of the solar system. But in addition to the working fluid spent on the delivery of an unfinished element and supplies to a stable orbit, nothing from the system disappears or disappears. All elements, if desired, can be transformed into something else, to build on their base something new and perfect. It's easier than extracting material from scratch. The following three examples of this:
2. Need to signal the light years to another system? Or get a weak signal from afar? Here elements of the Ring will be useful: each element is an antenna itself, you can assemble several elements of the Ring into a parabolic or spherical antenna, turn it in the right direction and add a radiating / receiving device to the focus.
3. Do you need to collect a huge ship-ark in order to reach the neighboring star (at a speed much slower than the speed of light) for hundreds of years? Elements of the Ring are easier to disassemble and recycle on the spot in the ship, rather than build a ship from scratch.
4. Need to assemble a huge ship with a solar sail? You can take one or more elements of the Ring and build something like a slow ship flying in the solar wind, in addition to the impulse of other engines.
5. Do you need to accelerate a smaller ship using an external energy source? This can be done by directing laser or other rays (light, RF radio) from the Ring elements to the receiving antenna of the ship (the energy received there will then be directed to ion / plasma or other engines), or to a reflecting mirror (photon rocket) - photon thrust.
Acceleration of the probe with a laser beam
The latter term quite loudly sounded as quite feasible in the next 30-50 years the idea of ​​the project DEEP-IN ( Directed Energy Propulsion for Interstellar Exploration ), promoted by Yuri Milner, Stephen Hawking, and especially Philip Lubin (since 2013) https: // arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1604/1604.01356.pdf .
By the way, a similar idea of ​​interstellar travel was expressed in 1984 by Robert Forward (now his designs are called the traditional schemes of the solar sailboats of Matloff and Forward ). The new idea about the acceleration of ultra-low (grams in) interstellar probes with thin and small (about 1 m in diameter) light sails of super-power ground and orbital (located in space) arrays of lasers caused a great resonance and serious discussions. In principle, with the resolution of many technical problems, the main one being laser ablation of the sail material, such a system could zapurnut mini-probe into the interstellar space with speeds of course not 20%, but at least about 5% of the speed of light. The idea of ​​the project is based on Philip Lubin ’s article “A Roadmap to Interstellar Flight” with a project plan that the author sent to the JBIS scientific journal: Journal of the British Interplanetary Society as early as April 2015, and the last edition was dated September 2016 . By the way, in this presentation , on slide 44, Lubin addresses the idea of ​​the Dyson sphere and the problems of finding such structures.
There are several huge objections to the feasibility of the project (almost immediately voiced by critics, for example, briefly and in the case here http://trv-science.ru/2016/04/19/dvojka-po-fizike/ - continued: http: // trv -science.ru/2016/05/17/pod-zvezdnym-parusom-k-alpha-centauri/ ). Thus, the DEEP-IN project states that laser arrays for such acceleration can be located in near-earth orbits (to avoid absorption of the laser by the atmosphere, self-focusing of the beam) or even on Earth in a high and dry place (in the presentation video). And supposedly from there they would quickly and quickly disperse the probe to the desired speed.
The problem is that it is impossible to accelerate such a mini-probe with a small sail too quickly - acceleration will break it, it is also impossible to illuminate a thin sail with an excessively powerful laser beam - heating will melt the sail or blow it through during the ablation of the material from radiation. You need to accelerate the probe slowly and not too powerful laser.
However, with slow acceleration of the probe, another serious problem arises with the laser beam: since any laser has a divergence (divergence) of the beam, the beam diverges with the distance. The angle of divergence of the beam is usually equal to: θ = 1.22λ / d , where λ is the wavelength, d is the diameter of the beam (the diameter of the laser outlet). The discrepancy for conventional (narrow-aperture) lasers is approximately 1 angular minute. This means that the laser beam on the moon will already be about 2 km in diameter, and beyond the orbit of Mars it is already hundreds of kilometers! ( more info here ). Illumination of a sail of a minizonda at such distances with such a weak, scattered beam will be almost useless for its acceleration - slow acceleration will break beyond the orbit of the Moon.
But the authors of the project have high hopes for the phase-controlled radiation arrays of small erbium (Yb) fiber lasers (efficiency up to 78%) with a phase control device. In some ways, the idea of ​​such an array of lasers resembles the idea of ​​a radar with an active phased antenna array: like elements of a phased antenna array, lasers must change the relative phases of their radiation in a complex way so that it is amplified in one desired direction and suppressed in all other directions ( Ideally). An important positive detail for the feasibility of the project is the serious progress of such fiber lasers in recent years - progress in both power and compactness (there is a decrease in size according to Moore's law) and in price. About 20 million phase-matched small fiber kilowatt Yb lasers weighing 25-30 kg with an efficiency of about 50% and with a short wavelength (in the region of 1 micron or 1060 nm) can be placed on a 1-by-1 field to get the output laser radiation of tens of Gigawatts - the so-called DE-STAR 4 array. It is stated that the beam diverging angle of such an array will be: θ = 1.22λ / d = 10 ^ -9 radians = 0.0002 arcseconds, since d here will be about 1000 However, it is the linear dimensions and the mass of such a grating that make the authors of the project choose from the lasers terrestrial accommodation that leads to problems with the atmosphere on the beam path.
And the problem of pointing the laser at such a small and remote for millions of kilometers sailing probe also remains.
But you can accelerate the mini-probe, first with an array of lasers from the Earth's orbit, then with another array on the Moon, then with the third one further away ... and so on.
And elements of the Ring (remaining in their orbits) can produce energy for such arrays of lasers, or be a platform for the installation of such lasers. To do this, they must be set up in different orbits around the Earth, at Lagrange points, in orbits around the Sun, with a radius of just over 1 AU.
Ring elements can be sent in advance to points (for example, by conventional engines or using solar wind and using illumination from other Ring elements) along the future flight path of such a probe from the Earth's orbit and even to the very edges of the Solar System. There, with energy stored in batteries and / or in fuel, the elements of the Ring will wait for the moment of the mini-probe passing by and illuminate it from behind with moderately powerful laser beams within its part of the trajectory (0.3-0.5 million km long), then transmitting the probe as follows items:
At the same time, they in turn emit energy by a beam to a mini-probe, accelerating it within the range of their beam, passing each other the accelerating ship as if on a relay.
Or a slightly more advanced option: without using the energy reserves in the batteries, but simply sending light / energy along the chain from one element to another, so that the current active element, the last to accept this energy, would direct it to the mini-probe accelerated beyond our system:
By the way, Ring elements can overclock not only such mini-probes for flights outside the system. Right from its place in the Ring, the element can accelerate and slow down the intrasystem cargo ships with solar sails when delivering cargo from and to the Ring elements (of course, this is not about high speeds). With this, you can start mastering the photon thrust, improving the techniques and methods for slow acceleration and deceleration of ships inside the solar system. In this work in 2013, the authors (including Philip Lubin) discuss in detail such intrasystem flights with braking after the ship turned around with a sail-mirror forward (ping-pong method).
Problem with ring detection from outside
The moment associated with sending signals outside (example 2. above) occurs even at the assembly stage of such a Ring. Whether the creators of the Ring want it or not, but if the Ring elements are combined into segments with characteristic dimensions of about 1 million km (the diameter of Jupiter - the largest planet of the Solar System - is about 0.14 million km, which is 7 times smaller), then any external observer , being approximately in the plane of the Ring, begins to register (regardless of the desire of the creators of the Ring) strange, previously unseen, periodic eclipses of the central luminary by a certain object, which by linear dimensions certainly exceeds the size of the giant planets. And the observer (there are more of them in the Galaxy) most likely will not notice anything in the plane of the Ring. This is an important point: there are not so many chances for a casual observer to be from the right direction from such a star.
If in this system, at given distances from the star (with given periods) no giant celestial bodies such as red or brown dwarfs, black holes, cold (non-radiating infrared background) thin dust-gas protoplanetary clouds (as described here ) are detected by available astronomical methods then this is a serious reason for the observer to think about the artificial causes of this phenomenon.
As it happened with the astronomers of the Earth, who recently with the help of the Kepler space telescope noticed periodic (once in about 750 days) and short (about a day) luminosity reduction by 10-22% of an exceptionally stable star (normal spectral type F3 V / IV) under the number KIC 8462852 ( https://geektimes.ru/post/267022/ ). She is also a Tabbi star , around which (according to observations) there are no other satellite stars (red dwarfs), no increased infrared or ultraviolet radiation, and therefore most likely there is no planetary nebula, no asteroid belts, or brown dwarfs close to the star - to put it simply, there are no natural astronomical reasons that could explain such a huge eclipse of the central star. There were versions with comets, more precisely, exo-comets ( https://geektimes.ru/post/266408/ ), an asteroid belt, or a recent collision of local exoplanets.
It should be noted that the period of eclipses of 727 days corresponds little to the characteristic periods of orbits for our system (not to mention the fact that the flight of comets near a massive star like the Sun often leads to a complete or partial disintegration of comets or to a strong change in their orbits). It is difficult to imagine such a huge (covering 1/5 of the disk of the star) and compact (covering just a day or a couple of days) a swarm of comets that manage to close 22% of the light of that star with such a strange period of 750 days from us with its cores or tails. This is discussed here .
Then a version was added (not yet dropped) with a special angle of observation of a planetary disk (cloud) with cold continuous outer layers located far around this star and blocking infrared radiation of the inner layers ( https://geektimes.ru/post/280062/ ). This, so to speak, natural analog of the man-made Ring described above sometimes overshadows a star by 15-20%. Suppose it is, it may well be. But how does this obviously very thin (but not discontinuous) disk manage to overshadow not a small star of just a day?
Recently, there was news about the processing results by two experts from the USA (Valery Makarov from the US Naval Observatory in Washington and Alexey Goldin from Teza Technology) of raw data from the Kepler space telescope with two large eclipses of this star. Among other things, they checked the position of the star relative to other objects during eclipses. The results they got were very strange - they claim that at the moment of the eclipse the star itself (more precisely, the "center of brightness" of the light from it) shifted relative to the receiving matrix of the telescope! The conclusions so far are: either Tabby's star is obstructed by some comets or planetoids (still considerable), but not on the orbit of this star, but on the orbit of some other massive body (black hole? Brown dwarf?) Closer to us (along the line of observation), or some object of non-natural origin at KIC 8462852 itself is to blame.
The period of 727 days corresponds approximately to the parameters of the orbit in the habitable zone or outside the habitable zone for this star (it is about 1.5 times larger than the Sun, its luminosity is 4.7 times the solar one, therefore the period should be clearly more than 400-500 days).
By the way, the analysis of Leonid Ksanfomaliti from the Institute of Space Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences revealed an unusual shape of the light curve (the curve below is taken from the original article and is simply enlarged) for the two deepest dips / eclipses:
The speeds of first falling and then increasing the brightness of the star are asymmetrical, which may be evidence of the elongation of the orbits of the darkening bodies. Further, based on the shape of the curve and the duration of the coating, Xanfomality estimated the possible orbital parameters of the cosmic body causing the eclipse.
From his estimates it follows that the body rotates in an elongated orbit with a pericenter of 3.83 astronomical units and a orbital period of 6.26 years. However, the author himself notes the contradictions of his estimates, noting that with such a distant pericenter (in the Solar System it would be located behind the asteroid belt), the projection of the orbit from any angle would look like a nearly straight line and the asymmetry of the brightness drop curves would not be observed.
Astronomers at the next eclipse (in 2017) would be useful to calculate the shape of the objects eclipsed by the exact graph of the fall and rise of the luminosity of the Tabbi star, especially since this technique is: ( http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0503580 ) . There are also methods for determining the angle / direction of the intersection of a star's disk with an object like a planet:
If the shape of these objects turns out to be not round, for example, square or triangular, then this is already an obvious indication of the artificial origin of the eclipsing objects.
By the way, the “small ripples” of eclipses of the Tabbi star in principle fit the effect of the unfinished elements of the swarm obscuring the light of this star, and large eclipses every 750 days can be caused by the swarm’s super-elements that have been completed to gigantic sizes (or by combining many small elements).
Findings:
The arguments cited above in this article suggest that any advanced civilization of a technical type, with the desire and will to expand its presence in space using space resources, will most likely build some sort of Dyson type I discontinuous sphere (in the form of Roy Dyson), using it is not so much for the increase of habitable places (although it is possible to live somehow on such elements), but for two main purposes:
- controlling the illumination (and therefore the climate) of one’s own planet, as well as other developed planets, asteroids;
- receiving enormous energy from the light of its star, using it on site or with shipment throughout its entire system.
In addition, such a civilization will receive two or three other nice bonuses:
- ;
- ;
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I hope that the above arguments for the construction are not at all Dyson's sphere, but rather Roy in the form of Dyson's Ring were quite convincing. I want to believe that with the development of real development (and not studying, as they say now) of our solar system, sometime these or similar arguments will convince our descendants to build just such a variant of the Dyson sphere in the form of a non-rigid Ring. I am sure that more advanced civilizations in our galaxy were already convinced by similar arguments many thousands of years ago and now they are simply busy with the work that they have been stretching for many thousands of years, to which they undoubtedly were ready from the very beginning of construction.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/397631/
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