As the mystery of Tabby’s Star ages, the bizarre explanations fade away in favor of something a little more likely. NewScientist (26 August 2017) reports:
… Mario Sucerquia and his colleagues at the University of Antioquia in Colombia have proposed another possibility: a ringed planet, similar to Saturn, orbiting close to the star. Such a planet would dim the star’s light in an irregular way during a transit.
First, the rings would block some of the star’s light, followed by the planet, which would dim it further. Then, after the planet passes, the rings would block some light again.
But because the rings would be at a different angle each time, the small dips at the beginning and end of the transits would be larger or smaller. Without seeing many transits, there would be no obvious pattern to this.
To test this idea and measure the irregularity, Sucerquia and his colleagues simulated a light curve from a ringed planet about one-tenth the Earth-sun distance from its star. They found another effect: the star would tug on the rings, making them wobble. This would make the silhouette of the rings as seen by an earthbound observer even more irregular from transit to transit (arxiv.org/abs/1708.04600).
Sounds a bit like my software designs’ evolution – from byzantine to the mundane.
