What's Actually Dimming This Mysterious Star

If it is not aliens, what is dimming Tabby's Star so dramatically and so strangely? The best answer is dust, but not ordinary dust.

To block a fifth of a star's light, you need an enormous amount of material, spread unevenly, drifting between us and the star.

The leading explanation is that the star is wrapped in vast, clumpy clouds of fine dust. When a thick clump drifts across our line of sight, the star dims, then brightens again as the clump moves on. But where did all that dust come from? The most popular idea is a catastrophe: a comet, a moon, or even a small planet torn apart, shattered into a colossal cloud of debris that now orbits the star in uneven streams.

So the strangest star in the sky may be showing us the aftermath of a cosmic disaster: the pulverized remains of a world, slowly circling its star and casting a shifting shadow our way. Not aliens, but arguably just as haunting.

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