ScienceDaily (July 5, 2012) — Astronomers report a baffling discovery never seen before: An extraordinary amount of dust around a nearby star has mysteriously disappeared.

"It's like the classic magician's trick -- now you see it, now you don't," said Carl Melis, a postdoctoral scholar at UC San Diego and lead author of the research. "Only in this case, we're talking about enough dust to fill an inner solar system, and it really is gone!"

"It's as if the rings around Saturn had disappeared," said co-author Benjamin Zuckerman, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy. "This is even more shocking because the dusty disc of rocky debris was bigger and much more massive than Saturn's rings. The disc around this star, if it were in our solar system, would have extended from the sun halfway out to Earth, near the orbit of Mercury."

The research on this cosmic vanishing act, which occurred around a star some 450 light years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Centaurus, appears July 5 in the journal Nature.

"A perplexing thing about this discovery is that we don't have a satisfactory explanation to address what happened around this star," said Melis, a former UCLA astronomy graduate student. "The disappearing act appears to be independent of the star itself, as there is no evidence to suggest that the star zapped the dust with some sort of mega-flare or any other violent event."

Melis describes the star, designated TYC 8241 2652, as a "young analog of our sun" that only a few years ago displayed all of the characteristics of "hosting a solar system in the making," before transforming completely. Now, very little of the warm, dusty material thought to originate from collisions of rocky planets is apparent.

"Nothing like this has ever been seen in the many hundreds of stars that astronomers have studied for dust rings," Zuckerman said. "This disappearance is remarkably fast, even on a human time scale, much less an astronomical scale. The dust disappearance at TYC 8241 2652 was so bizarre and so quick, initially I figured that our observations must simply be wrong in some strange way."

Norm Murray, director of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics, who was not part of the research group, said, "The history of astronomy has shown that events that are not predicted and hard to explain can be game-changers." ... The rest of the article continues here thought that was enough.

Skip the blue if you know all about 'Dyson Swarms' or Dyson Speheres.

By the way a Dyson Swarm, often known as a Dyson Sphere, is where you basically strip a solar system bare to craft artificial satellites by the billions or trillions to totally encapsulate a star, so you can suck every last damn drop of energy out of it. You might remember one from an old Star Trek: TNG episode where Scotty shows up, but they are often depicted as big hollow spheres, when it's more accurate to think of them like a ring again to Saturn's, only as a big torus (donut), like this or various concentric layers of toroids (many donuts composed of many, many satellites). For those who don't know the Earth, as a pea, is situated from the Sun, as a beach ball in the middle of a stadium, with the Earth off in the bleachers. We don't get much of the Sun's light here, around 1 part per billion.

So, we've always assumed that if someone really wanted to harness solar power, they'd just englobe their own star. This doesn't necessarily require all that much mass, a bunch of millimeter thick reflective surface bouncing to collectors might let you do this for the mass of a very large moon but you'll invariably use every last ounce of mass because it's there and because it's a navigation hazard left to itself anyway. Alternatively, if you've got fusion yourself, you don't really need a star anymore except as a handy orbital anchor and the bastard's burning all your precious hydrogen, so you go ahead and rip the thing apart, which would probably entail a similar englobement effort anyway. The 'How to List' on Killing Stars usually fall under the term 'Star Lifting' with one of the main methods being 'Huff-n-Puff' and these generally all call for the assisted suicide approach of using the star's power via a Dyson to get the job done.

Anyway, barring some cool kick-ass Star Trek/Wars/Gate power source operating under physical rules unknown to us, it is assumed one way or another you're relying on burning hydrogen for power and thus will be wanting something better than a meager billionth of a stars power output, and will either englobe it or extinguish it. So it is assumed, since doing either violates no know laws of physics [yes, we've got the tech to build something like this, but it's akin to a rural village deciding they want to build the great Wall of China] that any alien race will eventually get around to doing this, and further that if they did spread out to others stars they'd repeat the performance. For detailed info on Dyson Spheres, try here

Needless to say suddenly watching a star disappear would be one way to find them, but we usually assume the way you look for them is to go looking for waste light in the infrared range, essentially, 'why is this big chunk of space giving off IR at an intensity of several million exawatts?' so SETI types do actually look for these.

Obviously I'm not saying this solar system is such a thing, more raising the quick reminder that when bizarre phenomena show up with no explanation it can indicate some cool new dynamic of science that overthrows existing notions or it could be you left out that other classic explanation. If you encounter several tree stumps in the woods surrounded by piles of sawdust it is a good idea to consider a more human source of cause then 'freak localized whirlwinds carrying abrasive material' or some energetic new variety of beaver or termite. Someone may be on hand with a chainsaw, and it's worth noting that in all probability when/if we do discover 'other intelligent life out there' it is very likely it will be like this, reported as an interesting footnote and someone eventually says 'uh... maybe it's not interesting the way we think it is.' This always wraps back around to the Fermi Paradox, 'if aliens are out there, where the fuck are they?' and most of the possible explanations commonly given have gigantic gaping logical fallacies driving them.

Mostly of course this phenomena is a cheap excuse to discuss aliens and sci-fi crap and the Fermi Paradox, which always makes for interesting chat on the board when you're bored, as I am now. This is an important discovery, massive alien engineering project or not, since determining the 'why' on this one is likely to serious alter our models on solar system formation, but it is amusing to think we might be staring at some alien constructor fleet. Also, this kind of mega-engineering happens to be one of my own areas of obsessive interest so I like BSing about it, and I've noticed the subject tends to be popular on the board too.