00:00Something enormous appeared to pass in front of a distant star.
00:03It blocked more than 20% of its light.
00:06But what astronomers discovered afterward made the mystery even stranger,
00:11because no ordinary planet should be able to block so much of a star's light.
00:15The star was known as KIC 84, better known as Tabby's Star.
00:21It lies more than 1400 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus.
00:26While studying Kepler telescope data, citizen scientists found something unusual.
00:31A normal planet causes a small, regular dip in starlight.
00:36But this star dimmed in uneven patterns. Some dips were shallow,
00:40others blocked more than 20% of the star's light, and none followed a predictable pattern.
00:46Whatever was crossing the star did not behave like one solid object.
00:50The dimming appeared fragmented, as if several separate clouds were passing in front of it.
00:56Then the mystery deepened. Astronomers also detected slower fading, lasting months and years.
01:03The changes were not limited to brief dips. Large amounts of warm dust near the star
01:08should glow strongly in infrared. But astronomers found no matching infrared glow.
01:13That weakened some of the earliest dust theories. Then scientists found an important clue.
01:18The star dimmed more in blue light than it did in red. That pointed toward fine dust,
01:25not one solid object. But where had so much dust come from? Why was it distributed unevenly? And what
01:32kept causing the unpredictable dips? Researchers considered swarms of comets, colliding planetary debris,
01:39even dust between the star and Earth. But none could be confirmed as the source. The strangest theory
01:45was that vast artificial structures surrounded the star. Astronomers searched for radio and optical signals,
01:53but detected nothing artificial. The evidence still pointed toward dust. Years later.
02:00Tabby's star remains one of astronomy's strangest objects. The evidence points toward dust, but scientists
02:07still cannot explain where that dust came from, or why it repeatedly crossed the star.
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