Fwd: Google Alert - Tabby's Star

[Keith Henson]

-------- Forwarded message ---------

From: Google Alerts <googlealer...@google.com>
Date: Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 7:04 PM
Subject: Google Alert - Tabby's Star
To: <HKeith...@gmail.com>

	Tabby's Star Daily update ⋅ July 17, 2026
	NEWS
	Tabby's Star: The Light That Shouldn't Flicker - YouTube YouTube A star 1470 light-years away dims in ways no one can explain. Scientists are still searching for answers. What do you think is hiding in the dark? So I responded: It may be natural, but about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year sphere also flicker the same way. If it were only one, I can imagine it is natural, two dozen clustered this way looks like a civilization expanding into space at maybe 1/3 of C. If this is the case, what we may be seeing is data centers out in the relatively cold "computational zone" where the low temperature keeps down computational errors. From the depth of the dip and the time of crossing, it is in an orbit about as far out from the star as Jupiter is from our sun, and the orbit would take about 19 years. Why would aliens build such a thing? As a guess, they live in a data center, hundreds of times as large as the Earth, as uploads. As another guess, if we can resolve planets that far away, there is a planet in the habitable zone around Tabby's star where they originated biologically. The closest star that shows this behavior is only 511 ly from Earth, so if you live a very long time, they may come here and process the asteroid Vista into a data center.. Why don't we see any propulsion lasers or hear any radio waves is a mystery. They probably don't have FTL or they would have been here a long time ago. Keith Flag as irrelevant
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[John Clark]

On Thu, Jul 16, 2026 at 11:23 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It may be natural, but about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year sphere also flicker the same way.

I asked GPT the following question: 

ME: Somebody told me that about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year sphere centered on Tabby's star flicker the same way that Tabby does. Is that true? 

And this is GPT is answer 

GPT: "Yes—but there are some important caveats.

Around 2021–2022, astronomer Richard Schmidt and collaborators searched the Kepler database for stars with light curves resembling Tabby's Star. They reported finding roughly two dozen candidate analogs (21–24, depending on the selection criteria) that exhibited similarly unusual, irregular long-term dimming.

The surprising part was not just the number of candidates. Schmidt claimed that many of them appeared to be:

• within roughly 1,000 light-years of Tabby's Star, and
• concentrated in the same region of the sky, rather than being randomly scattered throughout the Milky Way.

If true, that would be quite unexpected. Since stars in that volume generally have no direct physical connection, a localized concentration could suggest either:

• an interstellar environmental effect,
• some previously unknown astrophysical phenomenon affecting that region,
• or (more prosaically) a subtle selection effect or bias in the data analysis.

This clustering is exactly why the result attracted attention in astronomy circles—and, unsurprisingly, among people interested in SETI.

However, this is the crucial point:

The claim has not become an accepted result.

Most astronomers view it as an intriguing observation that requires independent confirmation. There has not yet been a broad consensus that:

• there really are two dozen true "Tabby's Star analogs,"
• they all exhibit the same underlying phenomenon,
• or that they genuinely form a statistically significant cluster.

In fact, over the last several years, the mainstream picture has shifted toward the idea that Tabby's Star itself is probably not unique. It appears to belong to a broader class of rare "dipper" or irregularly dimming stars, most likely involving dust or circumstellar/interstellar material, although the detailed mechanism for Tabby's Star remains unsettled.

So the short answer is:

• Yes, a published analysis did report about two dozen similar stars, many lying within about 1,000 light-years of Tabby's Star.
• No, this has not become an established astronomical fact. The clustering remains controversial and has not been widely accepted as a demonstrated physical phenomenon.

Given the kinds of questions you've asked me over the past year, I suspect you'd find the statistical side of this particularly interesting. The key question is: How improbable would such a cluster be if these stars were randomly distributed? That turns out to be a subtle calculation involving the Kepler survey's sky coverage, stellar density, and the selection algorithm. It's actually the strongest—or weakest—part of Schmidt's argument, depending on whether the statistics hold up."

  John K Clark

[Stuart LaForge]

I don't know about transforming Vista into the data center,  but Beatriz Villarroel et. al. examined old photographs from the First Palomar Sky Survey and found transients that are clustered in triangular or linear formations show up in one plate, but are not there the next time that part of the ski surveyed.

Interestingly, these transients never showed up in earth's shadow (at 22-sigma significance) suggesting that they are metallic objects reflecting sunlight.

This was years before Sputnik or any artificial satellites were launched. Moreover, they seemed to increase in frequency on the photographic plates around

periods of nuclear testing and newspaper-reported UFO flaps.

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1538-3873/ae0afe

Abstract

Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring age offer a rare glimpse of the sky before the era of artificial satellites. In this paper, we present the first optical searches for artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. We follow the method proposed in Villarroel et al. and use a transient sample drawn from Solano et al. We use images from the First Palomar Sky Survey to search for multiple (within a plate exposure) transients that, in addition to being point-like, are aligned along a narrow band. We provide a shortlist of the most promising candidate alignments, including one with ∼3.9σ statistical significance. These aligned transients remain difficult to explain with known phenomena, even if rare optical ghosting producing point-like sources cannot be fully excluded at present. We explore remaining possibilities, including fast reflections from highly reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit, or emissions from artificial sources high above Earth’s atmosphere. We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude. The deficit is still present though at reduced significance (∼7.6σ) when a more realistic plate-based coverage is considered. This study should be viewed as an initial exploration into the potential of archival photographic surveys to reveal transient phenomena, and we hope it motivates more systematic searches across historical data sets. 

------------------------------

So maybe they have visited us. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no smoking gun, but the evidence is accumulating.

Stuart LaForge

[Stuart LaForge]

Here is an additional paper on the topic. This one is from Nature:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-21620-3

Stuart LaForge



On 2026-07-17 09:09, Stuart LaForge via extropy-chat wrote:
> On 2026-07-16 20:22, Keith Henson via extropy-chat wrote:
>>
>> Tabby's Star: The Light That Shouldn't Flicker - YouTube [2]

>>
>> YouTube
>> A star 1470 light-years away dims in ways no one can explain.
>> Scientists are still searching for answers. What do you think is
>> hiding in the dark?
>>
>> So I responded:
>>
>> It may be natural, but about 2 dozen stars in a 1000 light-year
>> sphere also flicker the same way. If it were only one, I can imagine
>> it is natural, two dozen clustered this way looks like a civilization
>> expanding into space at maybe 1/3 of C. If this is the case, what we
>> may be seeing is data centers out in the relatively cold
>> "computational zone" where the low temperature keeps down
>> computational errors. From the depth of the dip and the time of
>> crossing, it is in an orbit about as far out from the star as Jupiter
>> is from our sun, and the orbit would take about 19 years. Why would
>> aliens build such a thing? As a guess, they live in a data center,
>> hundreds of times as large as the Earth, as uploads. As another guess,
>> if we can resolve planets that far away, there is a planet in the
>> habitable zone around Tabby's star where they originated biologically.
>> The closest star that shows this behavior is only 511 ly from Earth,
>> so if you live a very long time, they may come here and process the
>> asteroid Vista into a data center.. Why don't we see any propulsion
>> lasers or hear any radio waves is a mystery. They probably don't have
>> FTL or they would have been here a long time ago.
>

> I don't know about transforming Vista into a data center, as ET might
> have to fight Musk over that, but Beatriz Villarroel et. al. examined

> extraordinary evidence. There is no smoking gun, but some intersting

> evidence is accumulating.
>
> Stuart LaForge
>

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