On 10/16/15, Tabetha Boyajian <tabetha.boyajian@yale.edu> wrote:
Hi,
Please see section 4 of this paper http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622.pdf <http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622.pdf>
Thanks for your interest,
Tabetha
--if you are trying to imply that sec 4 of that paper already examined my hypothesis, the answer is "no, it didn't." The word "trojan" occurs nowhere in that paper. That right there proves my hypothesis is new to you. Sec 4.4 does consider dust clouds (then the lack of infrared excess is claimed to argue against that explanation). But clouds not of "dust" but rather of "asteroids" (or "comets" -- the two are for my purposes the same; perhaps also "pebbles") are what I am proposing, thereby bypassing the IR objection. Why should there BE a cloud of asteroids? Sec 4 has no good reason such a cloud should exist and persist, but does mutter about temporary "aftermaths" in 4.4.2 and 4.4.3, which would seem inherently temporary and unstable and therefore unlikely, as well as argued against due to the IR excess lack, as well as unsupported by any discovery ever of any occurrence of this (far as I saw cited, anyhow?). Meanwhile my hypothesis does provide a reason why such a cloud of asteroids should be, and it is supported by experimental evidence in the sense that in our solar system, the trojans really are a localized cloud of over 6000 asteroids, they really did form, and they really did persist for gigayears, they really still are here. Our solar system's trojans seem capable of doing everything needed to explain KIC 8462852, except that (1) we need greater occlusion, so have to propose the same idea but bigger (2) perhaps your data (e.g. occlusion timings) can be used to see the trojan idea is wrong. Well, to do some actual arithmetic, let's say our solar system's trojans in total mass equalled Mars, but split into 6000 equal pieces. Their surface area would then be that of Mars times cuberoot(6000)=18. This is clearly inadequate to produce the occlusion levels you observed, but it is not peanuts -- this is approximately equal to the surface area of the planet jupiter. So our solar's trojans if they lay in a ball of the same size as our sun would produce about the same occlusion jupiter produces, i.e. 1% dimming of the sun. It does not seem impossible that in some other solar system, there could be an factor 20 more Trojans measured by surface area, thus being entirely capable of causing 20% dim of their sun. The question is: (a) is this really possible, and (b) with those trojans in a pretty small-diameter cloud (about the size of their star in diameter... or more but then with still more surface required). That is not obvious. Little is known about how our solar systems trojans formed, or about how they could form in general, so I doubt this is understood, which means you cannot refute me without considerable effort. Re (2) you'd have to actually look at the data. You can't just refute me in 1 sentence without doing so. Note there are TWO not 1 cloud of trojans in our solar system, and if we had more than 1 jupiter analogue then still more could be possible, so some fairly complex timing behavior would be possible under my hypothesis... but certainly most timing behaviors would be incompatible with the hypothesis, so it should be quite falsifiable, at least if enough observational data were got and enough computing done. But, if so, that falsification might not be a trivial matter. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step)