“Extraordinary claims, require extraordinary evidence.” – Carl Sagan

12.6.yc118 J114430 < Constellation 306 < Region 30

It’s been some time since I’ve posted an update, real life has kept me busy of late, so it is what it is. My wormhole journey continues, having hit 374 systems making that 14% of W-Space and 69% of all of New Eden explored. Still no ship losses. Since my last post, “W-Space – Why you not random?”, I’ve reached out to my corpmates in Signal Cartel and began Project “W”, where a few of us are recording our W-Space travels for 3 months. Which will end this month, then I hope to see what the data can tell us, if anything, as far as patterns and/or relationships between various classes of wormholes beyond what we already know. We may or may not see anything and the biggest issue we may not be able to overcome is having enough data to see anything. I’ll hold any further speculation until we bring Project “W” to a close and the results are posted later.

Having enough data to see anything leads nicely to a real life science initiative that’s found its way on Kickstarter, the “Most Mysterious Star in the Galaxy”. If you’re reading this blog, then I’m assuming you’re a SciFi nut with an interest in exploration, and with that being the case, it just doesn’t get more interesting than this.

On my blog post “Planter Hunters in the ‘Verse”, I shared my interest in a project that’s analyzing Kepler telescope data to look for planets orbiting distant stars. Well, it seems that project has turned up an interesting one indeed. If you’ve not heard about KIC 8462852, you should check it out. In a nut shell, the thought process behind planet hunters is to look for the dip in light when a planet crosses in front of a star as observed from Earth. To put this in perspective just how extraordinary KIC 8462852, which is the designation for the star in question, if someone from a distant star studied our solar system when Jupiter passed in front of our sun, they would see the light from our sun dim by about 1% for a few hours. KIC 8462852 had long periods of no indication of dimming to periods of multiple events lasting weeks and 100’s of days, dimming the light from its sun by up to 20%.

WTF? Project image designed by artist, Frank Okay

What does it mean? That’s where more data is required and why this Kickstarter is looking for funding and there’s only a few days left for them to reach their goal. Unfortunately, Kepler is no longer able to go back and gather that data. The project astronomers are looking to buy telescope time to continue that information gathering. Lots of speculation has been going on from various natural causes to advanced alien civilizations, but no one really knows. I love their Project name of “Where’s the Flux?” WTF? I love scientist that have a sense of humor, but more than that, I’m glad to see them be open minded. Until more data is gathered, we have no hope of knowing and sure it’s true, even then it may not be figured out. I’m with the lead astronomer on this one with my guess is that it’s a natural phenomenon, but what if it’s not?

Grace@NewEdenCaroline posted this on Twitter and she could be right…

If you love this kind of thing as much as I do, kick a few bucks in to the Kickstarter, there’s only a few more days left and they’ve not reached their goal yet. Who knows for sure what the reason is for this odd behavior is, I certainly don’t know, but what I do know is it’ll be extraordinary.