Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning with a classic episode that speaks to our exploration of Nibiru, occurring quite recently. Back in twenty twenty, we learned that a star vanished, a cosmic murder mystery.
That's weird, right, that's not supposed to happen.
It's not really supposed to happen.
Sometimes stars explode, but they don't vanish.
They just break into like smaller bits, yeah, or they have like a spinoff band or a solo project.
Yeah, turn into a black hole.
Right yeah, yeah, or a white dwarf or something.
You know.
The star collapses, but it always leaves forensic evidence. As we discovered, there was this investigation that turned into kind of a murder mystery out there in space.
That's right.
Recently, an enterprising group of astronomers, an astrophysicists found themselves transformed into space detectives to help solve this cosmic murder mystery in question.
So let's join this conversation already in progress with.
Us from UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn this stuff. They don't want you to know. A production of iHeartRadio.
Welcome back to the show.
My name is Matt, my name is Noah.
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always with our super producer Paul. Mission control decands, most importantly, you are you, You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. Today, we are investigating a mystery, and spoiler alert, it is not one that we are going to solve in today's episode. What are we talking about? Well, let's let's take a somewhat secuitous
route here. Let's start comparatively local and consider the Sun. You know it, you might love it, You've definitely heard of it. It's the closest star to uh. I almost said the US, But it's the closest star to Earth and the US. Uh. It's wildly popular. It's one of the few fads that humanity can largely agree is a good thing and should be kept around. But the Sun is far from the only star in the universe.
Really quickly, Ben, you know who doesn't like the sun? Me Beavis and butt Head.
Oh remember that part in the movie where they're like, the sun sucks.
That's all I got? Sorry, please carry I think exactly.
Dehydration, Yes, my skin also is not a big fan, but it is also the life giver of you know, it is the light bringer.
If you will u there we go.
So so, if you're you know, standing on Earth and you look out, you see our sun. That's definitely the most prominent star out there. But if you continue to look, even with the naked eye, if you're far enough away from a city, you can see that these things are everywhere. And then you imagine just that there are billions of galaxies out there in the vast nothingness. It's not really nothingness. It's the everything news. It's something news at the very least.
But within each of those billions of galaxies there are stars right.
Or space as a hoax? Oh right, maybe maybe I don't know. Well, here are the facts. Let's talk about stars.
Okay, so cool. If you look in one very specific direction out there into the cosmos, and then you travel let's say, seventy five million light years away from the Earth, you will find yourself in the Kinman dwarf galaxy. It's also known as PHL two ninety three B or f PHIL two ninety three B. There is a massive star inside this little dwarf galaxy and fairly little dwarf galaxy that is inside the constellation of Aquarius. If you're looking out there and looking at constellations.
Yes, this object in question is known as a luminous blue variable star or LBV, and part of me wants to just pronounce that, but it doesn't roll off the tongue the way Phil does.
Matt, you win with that one, sir.
But it's about two and a half million times brighter than the Sun. At least at one point in time, it was so Ben, what's the skinny? What happened with this like big brother to the Sun that is now no longer that thing?
Yes, as stude listeners, you may notice that we have started speaking in past tense about this star. Here here's what happened. This star is already relatively well studied in the modern day. Astrophysicists, astronomers and so on had investigated it for the better part of a decade from about two thousand and one to twenty eleven. There's nothing unusual about that. That is the routine research that scientists will do. This star, however, was different in that it was nearing
the end of its stellar life. It's right, stars, just like people or living things do have a finite span of time in their existence, and this star was in its older days. It was elderly. It was an elderly star for lack of a better word. And it was also subject to these weird, unpredictable variations and brightness. So, Noel, you had said this LBV was about two point five million times brighter than the Sun. It was, but it wasn't consistently at that brightness, and this was pretty baffling.
Stars like this are candidly pretty rare, but they are not unknown. So again, still, this star was not unique yet a handful of these have been discovered already. However, when people saw these fluctuations in brightness, some enterprising astrophysicists also recognized that as an enormous opportunity for possibly groundbreaking research, and so they said, out of the multitude of stars in the sky, we want to turn the telescopes back to this one and see if there's anything else we can learn.
Yes, a doctoral astrophysicist student at Trinity Dublin College did just that. A gentleman by the name of Andrew Allen
was very interested in the star. So back in twenty nineteen, he and his fellow star enthusiasts, professional star enthusias decided to use something delightfully named the European Southern Observatory is very large telescope, love it just to tell it like it is, And they wanted to use this device to get a closer look at this star as it started kind of approaching its twilight years, the end of its stellar life.
And that's what potentially.
Really offer some incredible research material, right Yeah.
And it's not as though they were going in, you know, completely blind about what may may happen. They had a pretty rough idea of what's going to happen to this star, because stars do a couple of general different things. But usually when a star, you know that's this much larger and brighter than the sun, begins to really end, truly end, it's going to explode in some kind, in some form or fashion. And there are several different types of these
explosions that we're going to talk about here. But it would it would explode, and we would notice because we would see it. Even though it's seventy five light years away and it takes that light that long to reach us, we would still be able to observe it.
Yeah, Yeah, and so we know that stars of this size tend to have violent deaths. And also, you know, I know I'm leaning into the comparisons here, and I maybe anthropomorphizing a bit, but you'll see why these comparisons are apt. So stars have Stars of this nature tend to have violent deaths. Here's what happens. They run out of hydrogen to fuse, right, and then the weight of
the stars starts squeezing on its core. It gets hotter and hotter and denser and denser, and then the star, almost as if it is struggling to prevent itself from dying, it begins to fuse heavier elements than usual and sort of a ay, a last ditch effort to keep from collapsing.
So from carbon to silicon to iron, each of these steps generates heat and pressure, but it's never quite enough, and the fusion of these heavier elements they don't give the star more energy, so boom, the core collapses, and the resulting shock wave of protons and neutrons colliding will rip the star apart. The outer layers are thrown out into the ink, out into space, and it becomes a supernova, and for very brief time, comparatively, the star is enormously bright.
This massive amount of chaos and pandemonium makes for a beautiful display. Actually it's weird that for us it's an amazing firework, but you know, it's tremendously damaging to the galaxies in which it occurs.
And it's one of those things where if you are observing even the region around a star that is going into super and ova or beginning to supernova, or has recently gone into that process, you'd be able to see it because it's not just you know, if you think about our sun, it's not just kind of that ball of gases that's burning, right. It's now if you imagine, you've seen it before depicted in movies and science fiction television probably, but it is now kind of coloring the
space around it, the darkness around it. Right, it looks like a splotch now more than kind of a spherical thing, because it's all those gases that Ben was talking about, the radiation, it all just kind of looks to have spilled out into the space around it for quite a while.
It doesn't just explode and then it's done, right, It doesn't last for a few seconds the way it does in maybe a Star Wars or you know, something like that, it's there and you're observing it again over the course of several years.
Man.
Yeah, so after the blast, this dense core that's left behind from stellar material might collapse into a black hole or a neutron star. And those are two of space's most head scratching kind of mysteries that we really don't know what happens when you get sucked into one of these, or at least not as much as we would like.
But that's not what happened to LBV. When Andrew Allen searched for this LBV, he stumbled across a bit of a galactic mystery, sort of like a victim in some kind of cosmic noir detective story.
I love this Ben.
The star just just you know, like they like Kaiser SoSE like that it was gone. And in order to investigate this mystery and kind of follow the clues, the researchers had to look back at previous observations and snapshots
of the star taken in two thousand and two. In two thousand and nine, and they discovered something very interesting, which was that the star I had been undergoing a very strong one of those outburst periods that Matt was talking about during that time, getting rid of throwing off enormous amounts of that stellar material at a much much faster rate than normal.
I would just like to point out that is not a supernova they're talking about there, Like, it's not an explosion. It's it's ejecting material the way maybe you've seen the Sun with a coronal mass ejection or some of the filaments that just will escape from the surface of the Sun and head out into space.
It's a space tantrum.
Yes, yeah, star tantrum. It's yeah, that's essentially what we're talking about here, but at a much higher rate.
That's a very good point, Matt. And so what happened next, Well.
The researchers know that this kind of star variable LBV like this can experience these space tantrums as they age, and that can cause them to glow more brightly. But what they found was that the outburst they could prove and trace ended some time after twenty eleven, right when routine observation the star halted, and that meant that they needed some they needed to do some space detective work, because sometime between twenty eleven and twenty nineteen, this star
simply vanished. So what happened? That's our question today, and we'll attempt to find some answers. Afterword from our sponsor. Here's where it gets crazy, Okay, juries out what happens.
Well, that's kind of the point of this episode, guys. We don't know exactly what happened, and scientists, even brilliant younger people who are you know, getting PhDs in astrophysics, who are observing the thing directly, are trying to figure out exactly what happened. But the cool thing that occurs when you know, strange things go down is that there are a bunch of explanations, proposed hypotheses, theories about what
perhaps occurred here. And what we're going to do from here on out is just explore some of the things that may have happened with this star. And some, of course, are a little more out there than others. Some are a little more mundane, little boring. But it's okay because it could be any of these because guess what's coming up in a second Ben.
Oh yeah, strap In, I have a clear bias on this one, guy. I have the one that I very much want to be true. We're gonna get to aliens in a second, but right now it's already spooky and disquieting enough to note that stars do a lot of things. They don't just disappear, that doesn't happen. They leave a trace. Like you said, No, there will be a black hole, right, there will be there will be some sort of detritus.
But this one seems to have just vanished. So if we look at the possibilities, I suggest we start with the mundane, or as you said, Matt, maybe the more boring aka plausible stuff. First, we have to remember to a point I think one of us made earlier, that we're looking at something from a long, long, long way away. There's a lot of space in between us and this star, so much space that there's a lot of time in
between us and this star. And in that space, that geographic space between us and this star, there are plenty of things that get in the way.
To preface this, I want to point out something that Matt mentioned off air, that you know, in that there's that gap between the observation periods twenty eleven and twenty nineteen. There anything could have and all bets are off anything could have happened in that time, So just keep that in mind. But one pretty simple and a little bit mundane explanation could be that the star dimmed considerably after its outburst and was then further obscured by a thick
kind of cluster of cosmic dust. If that's the case, then the star could reappear in future observations, because again, these are these clouds, this kind of veil could drift through space, and that's a lot of time for something like that. You know, things move very slowly in space, at least far away when you're observing it. That absolutely would be a scenario where the star didn't actually go anywhere, it just wasn't observable at the time.
Just what I would say here that this one feels a little odd to me is just how bright the star was in question here the LBV, because you know we mentioned at the top it was two and a half million times brighter than the sun.
Yeah. Right, that's some robust cosmic dust right there, you know.
Well it is for sure, It's just we don't know how far away, you know, where that veil would be located in between the two points right on that on that line.
I mean, would that be sort of like an asteroid belt or something like like a cluster of like closely knit together material that would potentially obscure something from view.
This is what I find hilarious about this. This is classic human This This theory is basically that it is saying that seventy five million light years is a lot of space and that there could be something in front of the telescope. We're dressing it up to sound fancy and we're going to talk about some weirder stuff. But this, this is like one hunder a possibility and feels like the exact kind of delightful hyjiinks our species gets itself into.
It's like the cosmic equivalent of accidentally having your thumb slightly over the corner of the camera on your phone when you're taking a selfie.
You know, if your thumb was let's say, forty million light years away of a galaxy exactly exactly.
So we let's get into what we you know, what we like to talk about here, the weirder and more exciting explanation.
Then I think I leave this to you, my friend.
Oh oh, this is this is on the way to weird. I won't say this is We're not full weird yet on this one. But what if the star never really recovered from its space tantrums, what it was bleeding out all that material? What if it just somehow collapsed into a black hole, not with a bang, but with a whimper. What if no super nova occurred? In short, like, what if there wasn't an explosion like that for us to see, it just sort of became a black hole. This is
pretty crazy. This would be a rare event, and if it did happen, then the star would have made an enormous black hole. It would have a mass that was eighty five to one hundred and twenty times the mass of Earth's Sun, and we have no idea how that would have happened. That's like, that's at the stage of you know, spitballing in speculation, where someone says, maybe this could have happened, and then someone says, well, how do
you think it would have occurred? And everybody has to kind of throw up their hands and shrug because that doesn't make sense. It violates what we understand about the rules of physics.
Well, you know what they really would have to do, Ben, and it's something that would be completely beyond maya understanding is throw up a bunch of FIS equations that there's no way I could ever understand. But I've read some papers on this. We've all read some scientific papers on this now at this point and trying to wrap my head at least around the math that goes into calculating how it could become a black hole like that. People are doing it and they're checking it out and they're
checking you know, their maths. But I certainly couldn't explain it to you on this podcast. But like you said, rare, but could have happened.
Yeah, could have. There's another possibility that comes to us through some research, some pretty recent research at Cornell University.
Right, is this a step up in the weird spectrum?
This one, This is a weird one where it feels more plausible and a little less. I don't know. This one rides the line between mundane and strange. So let's let's just get into it.
I'm good with that. Yeah. They It was a project.
Through an article submission to our xiv dot org that is a mouthful r xivy dot org, which is like
a database, and that's through Cornell University. In February twenty twenty they weighed in on different potential outcomes that we just mentioned so far, and they added this one as another possibility, positing what if the light that these astronomers were observing all that time and observing that it had dimmed so significantly wasn't actually from an lbvstar but from the explosion of an lbvstar, from you know, a supernova lbvstar.
The scientists show that a type two end supernova could account for some of these previous misinterpretations of that light that would you know, in theory, have been coming from an active star rather than an explosion.
Your user error, then, is a good way to sum up that argument. It's not that the results were wrong or necessarily mysterious at that point, it's that our interpretation of those of that data was incorrect. And these scientists, you know, they make a pretty good case for this theory.
Yeah.
And if you know, you may think to yourself, what, no, man, there's no way brilliant people could mistake a star just being there physically somewhere and an explosion. Well, maybe think again. Here, I'm going to reading a couple quotes here from this article that was published. It says it is possible the sn supernova two end like event occurred sometime between September nineteen ninety five and September nineteen ninety eight, when no photometry is available, so no actual pictures of this star
and of the light being emanated from that area. Going back to the quote, in some cases supernova light curves exhibit bumps several years after the explosion. Now that would account for or you know, early on Ben was talking about how this star or wherever this light was coming from, it was very bright at times and then seemed to dim of it and then be very bright, even brighter, and then a little more dim And that's what they're describing here as these bumps in output of light. And
here's another quote here. The most plausible explanations for the recent dissipation of the broad emission after an unusually persistent phase are an LBV outburst followed by a slow weekly variable phase or a very long lived s N two end event that's a supernova event, so again exactly what
we described before. The most plausible things are that it just had that weird outburst, that space tantrum we talked about, then just dimmed very significantly after that, or it was a long lived supernova that we've just been observing as though it were a star, and they say the latter is more like given the lack of short timescale variability and the slowly fading light curve. Oh the language of scientists.
Everyone.
Yeah, you did a really good job of unpacking that, Matt, though, I applaud you. And now I think we're to Ben's favorite part of today's episode, when we get legitimately into the weirdest sphere here.
Oh, I yeah, I'm excited about this one. Guys. I think it's I think it's gonna be our I think we'll be unanimous in deciding this is our favorite part, this is our favorite possible explanation. But let's hold the tension just a bit longer. We'll pause for a word from our sponsor, and we'll be right back. Noel, Matt fellow conspiracy realist. Let's dream big. What if this mysterious star was never destroyed at all? What if reports of
its death are exaggerated? What if, instead of being annihilated, this star was simply tamed. Which sounds crazy, right, I'm anthropomorphizing left right here, But to put a very fine point on it, what if somewhere out there in the ink and extraterrestrial civilization has somehow mastered the art of taming stars and using them for energy.
Ooh, now we're talking, Ben, this is what I'm talking about. Taming a star. How does one do that? Well, it's not like you can lasso it or capture it in a trap of some sort.
Right, you know, we know that we haven't done it yet officially, but this is something I think we've talked about on stuff that I want you to know before, the concept of the Kardashev scale, and this is this is very interesting, but we have to explore just a little bit about this so it doesn't sound so the idea of someone taming a star doesn't sound absolutely bonkers, which maybe it is.
That sounds like something Doctor Manhattan would do, or like maybe four you know, fighting a star or taming a star.
But no, this is yeah, we can we can.
Put this in relatively grounded terms. So in nineteen sixty four, a Soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev proposed that a civilization's level of technological advancement is like a direct correlation to the amount of energy that the civilization is able to utilize, and he's got three categorized of civilizations into three categories,
type one, type two, type three. In a burst of creativity, as Ben would say, a type one civilization can manage the entire energy output and material resources of a planet. A Type two civilization is capable of harnessing the energy and material resources of a star and its entire planetary system, And a type three civilization is able to wrangle all of the energy and material resources of an entire galaxy.
Let's just try to simplify this ever so slightly, so within this scale, it's theoretically possible that some intelligent civilization somewhere out there in space has reached the level of a type two civilization. Type three is just beast mode, and this would mean the construction of something called a Dison sphere. No, that is not a ball vacuum cleaner. But I do believe that's where the name came from. If I'm not mistaken, or is the guy's name actually Dyson.
I think it's I think it's a connection because there's that Dison vacuum that has the sphere. I don't know, I'm just conjecturing here.
Yeah, it's the Dyson sphere is named after Freeman Dyson, but I don't think he's affiliated with the vacuums.
No, that's Sir James Dyson. It just happens.
This is just parallel thinking. James decided to keep his scientific smart's in the realm of keeping your home nice and tidy.
But they're both working with vacuums. When you think about it, that's very hairs point.
So I think it's perfectly spot on, and it's certainly helped help me look a little less foolish, and I appreciate that.
Oh no, no, no chumps in the squad.
I just want to put out there that I think we're talking about a type two civilization building a dice in sphere here. We'll get into it. I think we're actually talking about a type three civilization, gentlemen.
Here beast mode.
I think we're talking about beast mode because of the time frame where the dimmy occurred. But let's continue forward.
Yeah, yeah, So it's interesting that scale is a tremendously humbling one. If you are familiar with Kardashev, or if you have read his work, or if you you know, if you're thinking about this and putting humanity in this context, we are yet to become a type one civilization. We are below the bottom barrel of energy. Kardashev made a scale that is a little bit difficult for the average human to relate to, perhaps or the average society. But a Dyson sphere is even cooler than a Dyson vacuum.
Clear the technology, if it exists, would would be like that Arthur C. Clark quote. You know, it would be indistinguishable from magic to the average human being here on our ball of mud. The Dyson sphere is a theoretical structure that's just like the kind of trap you described, Matt. It's something that would be built or constructed somehow around the entirety of a star. Imagine putting the Sun in
a box and then this sphere. This contraption would capture all of the energy emitted by the star, and most importantly, it would be able to transfer that energy converted into some sort of usable form. For the enigmatic constructors of the Dyson sphere, this thing would be huge. It would be without exceptions, without hyperbole, It would be the biggest thing ever built as far as humanity could understand. Like you think the Death Star is a big deal in
star Wars. I mean, it's a huge plot point, doesn't have the best design, get it, sure, but it's massive. This would absolutely dwarf this. We have no idea how it would be built.
Absolutely, at least the Dyson sphere that was put forward, as you said, by Freeman Dyson in nineteen sixty, because you're talking about bigger than a star, right, it's some constructed thing that's larger than a star. Certainly boggles of the mind there. But there have been several theoretical, obviously very theoretical types of solar grids almost that would consist of smaller essentially machines and solar capture devices that would be placed close to a star, but not in the
same way as a Dyson's sphere. Wouldn't encapsulate the entire thing. But there are some really fascinating concepts out there right now about how you could begin down the road to a Dyson sphere.
Yeah, yeah, And I do want to give credit where it's due. Dyson formalized this idea back in nineteen sixty, but we believe he was inspired by earlier works of science fiction by authors like Oloff Stapleton and a fellow named J. D. Bernall, it's weird. The cool thing about science fiction is that sometimes it ends up being prescient, right, Like the US government True story has hired science fiction writers in the past and just said, Okay, yeah, whitch
this to us. This is a real thing we're working on. How should we handle it? And they get some wild answers, But yeah, Dyson. Dyson had a pretty solid logic. He said, Look, if humanity can continue our merry and mad experiments of existence, eventually we are going to expand our energy demands so much so that we are going to need to figure out a way to get the total energy output of the Sun. How do we do that? How do we make that happen? He came up with a Dyson sphere.
As you said, Matt, there are It sounds to bonkers, but there there are pretty I don't want to say conclusive. There are compelling and tantalizing arguments for the legitimacy or the feasibility of a Dyson's sphere. The craziest thing about this whole notion is that theoretically it's possible. Theoretically it is possible to build something around the stuff.
I really quickly just want to make a pop culture reference in the one hundred and thirtieth episode of Star Trek the Next Generation called Relics the Enterprise, you know, as they typically do respond to a distress call and they discover a dice in sphere, So a fun way to kind of see it sort of fictionalized because it is there's some science behind it, but it also it's one of those things that's a little nebulous, right, Like it's conceptually possible, but it's also like a thing in
Star Trek that they're presenting as though it's real, but we're not really there yet technologically to actually make that happen, And just to reiterate that was Star Trek the Next Generation Season six, episode four, aka the one hundred and thirtieth episode of the show called Relics.
Relics I liked heck man, I love Star Trek. I you two parts of it are corny, but oh man, I.
Find it very relaxing and comforting. I'll put it on before bed sometimes it sort of lulls me into a nice space trance.
I'm super into the Borg, the Q all of Oh.
Yeah, totally. I want to put this out there because I maybe I just am not fully understanding. I'd pose it to you guys as a philosophical question. I don't understand why an intelligence at that level would want to fully encapsulate a star knowing that effects that that would have on all of the Solar System that you know is surrounding that star. Like it feels like you'd want to capture the energy or enough of the energy of that star while still allowing it to keep you know,
the functionality of the Solar System. And maybe it's just my misunderstanding of how that would actually affect it, because you certainly wouldn't be sending heat anywhere throughout the Solar System anymore. If you put a dice and sphere on the.
Thing you're saying it would affect like gravitational balance or something like that.
Or what I mean, if there's any I guess you'd want to identify a star that doesn't have any life on any the planets, or observable life on any of the planets, if you're anything like the you know this crew of the starship Enterprise and you know the Federation and all that, or maybe if you don't give a crap and you're just you need that star energy. You just put a dice in sphere on that thing in if everybody else.
Well, here's the here. This is a great question, and it's also unfortunately a good argument against a dice in sphere being responsible for the disappearance of this star. And it's this, it's a question of efficiency. Why build an entire box or an entire sphere around a star when you can get all the energy you need from an
alternative design, like a dice in ring. Think about how much we save in terms of great Now we're space engineers, think about all the cost cutting we could institute if we just got a dice in what's sometimes described as a dice in swarm, and that would be instead of one contiguous sphere we have, we have like satellites in these positions, right, these immovable or static positions arranged in maybe a ring that would be the simplest form, or in a series of rings, like the lines of longitude
on a globe. Right, we would still be harvesting a tremendous amount of energy, but we would also you know, energy would be leaving the mechanism as well. And to your point, Matt, I think it's more dangerous for us to anthropomorphize alien life than it is to anthropomorphize stars, because it leads us down these dark roads, these dark paths.
To your question about why someone or some entity would build a sphere knowing that it could wreak havoc on a solar system, all we can say is that if an aliens or anything like us, if an extraterrestrial mind is anything like our own, then we can look at our human past and every time we have had a chance to do the right thing for the environment during you know, energy rushes, we have decided to go with the short term profit.
Yeah, Prime Minister Groulp needed that star energy.
Man, right right, We need that star energy. You know, the other life forms, we'll just have to deal with it. It's true, though there's no proof of this. It's just a fascinating idea. And you know, as we've discussed in previous episodes, whenever the concept of aliens somewhere out there in space comes up, they are more or less a mathematical certainty. And that makes this theory so fascinating for
a few different reasons. If a Dyson sphere, we know it can be built, but if there is a civilization capable of building one, that makes the possibility of finding intelligent extraterrestrial life so much easier. There's a big thing
that we can find, you know what I mean. And then second, if we find something like this, it would prove a powerful commonality because it would mean that these entities, these minds, whatever they are, would mean that they use energy in a way similar to us, That they, like us, derive nourishment and existence from a star. And that that sounds small, but philosophically that's astounding, that's kind of beautiful.
I mean, we have to remember every single thing that about discovering a Dyson sphere would be historic, It would be mind blowing, It would be no small way terrifying. But we also have to remember, you know, when we think about life and planets that carry life, we are stuck with a sample size of one, so we have no idea this would be. I would rarely say this, guys, but this would be a revolution of a spiritual level as well as a scientific and cecular one.
I really want, I really quickly want to point out that Popular Mechanics has a fantastic article called could we build a dice in Sphere? By Adam Hattisy from February twenty of this year, and so it is, you know, theoretically possible, but you know from everything that I've read, it would take like eighty years to build one, just with the metrics of what we know of how much material it would take, and just like the you know, the timeframe of constructing such a thing and just the
logistics of it. But there's also a few pretty cool videos on YouTube about conceptually what it would take to build a dice in sphere. But it's it's I love the stuff that like this that's conceptually possible, but we're just not there yet because it really scratches that sci fi itch for me.
And I think this is exact actly that. It's such an interesting story.
Well, we're in this scenario. We're talking about roughly nine years or a little less than that, some short period of time where this star went from extremely bright to disappearing. Right, So, if a Dyson sphere was installed, I'm thinking you got two halves of a dice and sphere and you ram them together and now it's.
Gone Iikeia style. I love I love it. Some assembly required, right.
Yeah, that would be like one million page Ikea manual.
And maybe it's also super simple. Maybe It's just the equivalent of one very vague assembly sheet, and it says take Dyson sphere half A, noted as A and attached to B not to just be I don't I don't know. I've been assembling a lot of a lot of furniture from sketchy places recently, and and I'm loving I'm loving the genre of writing that the instructions are in. But you guys are right, we can find this inspiring. The Dyson sphere is still kind of a I mean, it's
a thought experiment. There's a great YouTube video about this called In a Nutshell. If you guys are familiar with those series, they do animated excellent explanations various things of this nature. But the jury is still out. If you want a Dyson sphere to be real, and you want this LBV to be evidence of one, then we have somewhat good news for you. Currently, this star has yet
to reappear. No one has confirmed whether it transformed into a black hole, whether there's some kind of cosmic flotsam and jetsam in between the telescope and the star, and we don't know if it got bound into a Dyson sphere. We don't know what happened. There was no supernova, There was no sudden burst of light, no dying scream of emitted energy. Instead, like a drowning sailor, this enormous star
just sort of slipped beneath the waves. Also, on a somewhat depressing philosophical note, because of the passage of time, we have to realize that if this civilization existed, they existed seventy five million years ago. So even if they were there, our odds of finding them now are very very very very very low as we understand them. We should have ended on a higher note.
Sorry, it's all good. I do like that We're that we're ending here with a mystery because it gives us, you know, something to look forward to, because we will find out what happened to this star or the supernova. It's just going to take time. Thankfully, it won't take seventy five million years light years, but it will. Yeah, we'll get there.
What if what if there's some deep space equivalent of a Leviathan or a Kraken and it's like a life form and it like eats stars. What if there's a star eater out there that's.
Just swimming past the star for an elongated period of time.
The stuff nightmares right there, gentlemen, we want.
To hear from you, folks, think you as always so much for tuning in. What do you think happened to this? LBV? Can you solve the mystery of a star that again just disappeared? We've posed, We've posed various theories again, as Matt said, ranging across the spectrum of plausibility. But what did we miss? What do you think what would be the wildest thing that could happen? What do you think
is the most likely thing that could happen? And what should what should we be looking for when we search the sky at night?
Hmm?
Besides giant whales or space whales? Yeah, god, yeah, I do. Now, I just want to see that has that ever been depicted? We're gonna I'm gonna start just a Google search where giant space whales. We're gonna build it somewhere.
Didn't we talk about space whales in a recent episode and I and I incorrectly said that Mobius was a big purveyor of space whales, and he maybe did one space whale.
But we looked up pictures.
It's definitely a popular sci fi trope, but it wasn't mobias, but I don't know.
Oh the art, yes, I believe so, yeah, yeah they're amazing. Well, let us know what your take on a space wheel is. Also, I'm interested. I was thinking about this earlier. If we think about the universe just in terms of size, there could easily be life forms that are larger than our entire planet and we might never know.
It's just what do they breathe?
Man?
How does that work? Just just energy, bro, just straight space dust. I have no idea man, space.
Radiation. Maybe maybe they're like you know how whales have baileying that allows them to filter krill. Maybe they're doing something like Okay, look, this has nothing to do with this disappearance Star. We haven't solved the mystery. We want to. We want to hear from you, folks. Let us know. You can find us on Facebook, you can find us on Instagram. You can find us on Twitter, not just as a show, but as individuals.
Yes, if you wish, you may find me on Instagram, which is where I hang out. I'm not really a.
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All the things we've lost from COVID, You guys.
People are saying it at home along with us. We can hear you through the void.
Mm hm, and I will say I don't know. Go ahead and leave us some messages. We've got a big old backlog that we need to start curating, and we're already in the process of doing so. And there may be some opportunities to hear yourself on the show coming up in the near future. And then you know, if your phone isn't your thing and you want to Maybe you don't want to go on the social media, but you still want to, like participate in the stuff they don't want you to know.
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