KIC 8462852 Faded Throughout the Kepler Mission

TL;DR

KIC 8462852 exhibited a steady, then rapid, fading over four years, with no known stellar phenomena fully explaining its unusual dimming pattern, suggesting a unique or complex underlying cause.

Contribution

This study provides detailed photometric analysis of KIC 8462852's long-term dimming, revealing unprecedented brightness decline patterns not explained by existing models.

Findings

Monotonic 0.9% fading over 3 years

Rapid 2% decline in 200 days

No comparison stars showed similar fading patterns

Abstract

KIC 8462852 is a superficially ordinary main sequence F star for which Kepler detected an unusual series of brief dimming events. We obtain accurate relative photometry of KIC 8462852 from the Kepler full frame images, finding that the brightness of KIC 8462852 monotonically decreased over the four years it was observed by Kepler. Over the first ~1000 days, KIC 8462852 faded approximately linearly at a rate of 0.341 +/- 0.041%/yr, for a total decline of 0.9%. KIC 8462852 then dimmed much more rapidly in the next ~200 days, with its flux dropping by more than 2%. For the final ~200 days of Kepler photometry the magnitude remained approximately constant, although the data are also consistent with the decline rate measured for the first 2.7 yr. Of a sample of 193 nearby comparison stars and 355 stars with similar stellar parameters, none exhibit the rapid decline by 2% or the cumulative fading by 3% of KIC 8462852. Moreover, of these comparison stars, only one changes brightness as quickly as the 0.341%/yr measured for KIC 8462852 during the first three years of the Kepler mission. We examine whether the rapid decline could be caused by a cloud of transiting circumstellar material, finding while such a cloud could evade detection in sub-mm observations, the transit ingress and duration cannot be explained by a simple cloud model. Moreover, this model cannot account for the observed longer-term dimming. No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.