Planet Hunters X. KIC 8462852 - Where's the Flux?
T. S. Boyajian, D. M. LaCourse, S. A. Rappaport, D. Fabrycky, D. A., Fischer, D. Gandolfi, G. M. Kennedy, H. Korhonen, M. C. Liu, A. Moor, K., Olah, K. Vida, M. C. Wyatt, W. M. J. Best, J. Brewer, F. Ciesla, B. Csak, H., J. Deeg, T. J. Dupuy, G. Handler, K. Heng, S. B. Howell

TL;DR
This study investigates the mysterious flux dips of KIC 8462852, ruling out instrumental causes and proposing that a family of exocomet fragments from a breakup event best explains the observations.
Contribution
It provides a comprehensive analysis of KIC 8462852, constrains possible scenarios, and suggests exocomet fragments as the most plausible explanation for the flux dips.
Findings
Dips are astrophysical, not instrumental artifacts.
No significant IR excess or close companions detected.
Exocomet fragments from a breakup best explain the data.
Abstract
Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux of up to \%. The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 days. We characterize the object with high-resolution spectroscopy, spectral energy distribution fitting, radial velocity measurements, high-resolution imaging, and Fourier analyses of the Kepler light curve. We determine that KIC8462852 is a typical main-sequence F3 V star that exhibits no significant IR excess, and has no very close interacting companions. In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the dipping events observed in the Kepler light curve. We confirm that the dipping signals in the data are not caused by any instrumental or data processing artifact, and thus are astrophysical in origin. We construct scenario-independent constraints on the size and location of a body in…
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