Dip update 2/n

[orig. May 22, 2017]

Hi everyone! Just wanted to drop a short note to on the status of the dip. Since the Red Alert went out, an army of observers have congregated to observe the star at effectively all wavelengths in the electromagnetic spectrum using various techniques. The response from the community was (and still is) completely overwhelming. I never thought the white board in my office would be this cool looking! (NB: list is not complete)

Heres the light curve (circa May 22, 2017). Things seem to be slowing down but we will stay on our toes until we know for sure.

I had planned to write a longer update, but that was too ambitious with everything else going on. My revised plan is that from now on Ill write short, but more frequent updates. (The longer letter will still come to you, just not today!) This is so insanely exciting! Long live the dips! Tabby et al. PS: This is the first activity that we have seen since the Kepler observations. This is quite significant for many reasons. First and foremost, it confirms that what Kepler observed was 'real', i.e., not an artifact of the instrument performance or a glitch in the software data processing. While this was a very very unlikely cause of the variability seen in the Kepler data (for many reasons), it is now confidently ruled out as the cause.