SpiderImAlright

You guys are doing amazing work! I've read Tabby's paper and the G-hat series. No background in astronomy/astrophysics but this is amazing stuff!!

I have 2 questions atm:

(1) If Brad Schaefer's analysis is correct the star has been dimming for at least a century. It seemed to me a logical explanation for this could be that the star is actually losing mass. I did a back of the envelope calculation for how much mass that might be, tl;dr 1/20th of a solar mass. Could this be a plausible explanation for the possible long term dimming?

(2) Roger Pickard of the BAA VSS reported some interesting observations to the AAVSO. One set back in November and another more recently on May 4th. Have either of these been confirmed by anyone else to your knowledge?

One more question:

Let's say the occulting material is achromatic. Where do we go from there?

Sure, I assume you're referring to (2):

• November observations
• May observations

I reached out to Roger and he had this to say:

Interesting that you should pick up on that as the AAVSO queried both sets of observations with me as well (on behalf of the PI).

No, neither have been confirmed by a third party to my knowledge and I’ve been through both sets of observations myself several times but could find nothing wrong. I’ve never recorded anything quite like that before and I like to consider myself an experienced CCD observer.