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[–] Mal-2 0 points 4 points (+4|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Could it simply be some rapidly moving gas or dust or other form of obscuration that isn't part of the star's environment, but happens to lie on a line between us and it? Perhaps what we're seeing is just a dense patch in our own Oort cloud.

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[–] Mal-2 ago  (edited ago)

Well, someone else suggested I crunch the numbers, so I did. Here is that post in its entirely.

Fair enough, I'll sanity-check my figures and report accordingly -- whether they support my position or refute it.

The distance to the star is 1480 ly. The distance to the Oort cloud is 1.5-2 ly. Let's use the maximum since I'm trying to establish the minimum possible size of such an object. This is 0.14% of the way there, which would have very little effect on the required size of the object. It would have to be essentially two AU in size.

Two AU -- and that's the minimum necessary to explain the observations right now. This completely ignores the photographic evidence going back 200 years. 300 million km. That's a big fucking clump.

So while I'm not prepared to say it's impossible, I would agree it's pretty improbable.