Tabby's Star

The star with the strange, deep dips in brightness.

Tabby's Star (Boyajian's Star, KIC 8462852) is a binary in Cygnus about 1,470 light-years away, made of an F-type main-sequence star and a red dwarf. Citizen scientists of the Planet Hunters project found irregular dips of up to 22% in its brightness in Kepler data; the discovery paper led by Tabetha Boyajian appeared in 2015.

No explanation yet accounts for the whole light curve. An alien megastructure was suggested but the evidence argues against it, and a 2019 study proposed debris from a disrupted exomoon.