I know my friends tend to collide with things more often after a few libations. On Fri, Oct 16, 2015 at 1:22 PM, Warren D Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi, I thought of a simple argument which pretty much kills my "trojan horse" idea.
Consider any cloud of anything whose opacity is at least 20%. Any particle in this cloud will therefore collide, with probability at least about 20%, after performing 1/pi libations. Hence 1 to a few libations times later, the cloud will have greatly changed, i.e. its existence is clearly temporary.
The libation time for the jupiter trojans in our solar system has been estimated to be 150 years. It doesn't seem reasonable to suppose any cloud responsible for KIC 8462852 could have libation times over 100K years. Therefore,
(1) my "trojan horse" idea loses its whole advantage of having gigayear lifetimes, rendering it now unattractive. (2) other ideas of clouds arising from "aftermaths" intuitively seemed temporary, and this argument now verifies that intuition.
Further, the whole aftermath temporary cloud idea seems to me to have a hell of a lot of difficulty explaining how there are lots of different durations and magnitudes of the brightness dips. Why the hell should there be lots of different temporary clouds, all different sizes and/or in way-different orbits? I mean, asking for just one already was implausible due to its short life compared to that of the star, but several at the same time seems absurd.
So... alien megastructures seem called for. If that's what it is, those aliens seem pretty damn awe inspiring.
-- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)
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