In the vast expanse of space, where celestial bodies move in predictable rhythms, one star has defied expectations.
Meet EPIC 204278916, a star that doesn’t just dim like any ordinary star—it flickers in ways that baffle scientists.
Typically, when a planet passes in front of a star, it causes a dip in brightness of about 1%.
However, astronomers have observed dips as extreme as 65% for EPIC 204278916—a staggering anomaly.
This isn’t the first time such an unusual dimming pattern has been observed.
KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star, made headlines in 2015 for its erratic light fluctuations, leading to a flurry of theories ranging from swarms of comets to the possibility of an advanced alien megastructure.
Now, a second star—EPIC 204278916—has been identified with even stranger behavior, raising even more questions.
Could this be evidence of an entirely new class of cosmic phenomena?
The Case of the Flickering Star
EPIC 204278916 was discovered in 2014 by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, and for the last several years, a team of astronomers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Germany, led by Simone Scaringi, has been monitoring its light patterns.
Their findings are astonishing: for 25 consecutive days, the star’s brightness dropped erratically, reaching an unprecedented 65% dimming.
That’s not just a little shadow—it suggests that something immense and unusual is passing in front of the star.
To put this into perspective, Jupiter—the largest planet in our Solar System—would only block about 1% of the Sun’s light if it transited.
So what on Earth—or rather, what in space—could be responsible for a 65% dip in brightness?
Breaking Conventional Wisdom
For decades, astronomers have relied on well-understood principles to explain how stars dim and brighten.
When KIC 8462852 exhibited similar irregular dips in light, researchers proposed three main hypotheses:
- A massive swarm of comets blocking the star’s light.
- A rapidly spinning, oblate star that causes uneven brightness distribution.
- An advanced alien civilization building a Dyson Sphere—a hypothetical megastructure designed to harness a star’s energy.
But here’s the problem: none of these explanations fully hold up under scrutiny.
- The comet theory requires an impossibly high number of comets—hundreds of thousands of them—to transit the star in a coordinated manner.
- The “spinning star” hypothesis has been largely dismissed because it fails to account for the extreme dimming patterns.
- And while the alien megastructure theory is fascinating, scientists prefer to keep extraterrestrial explanations as a last resort until all natural explanations have been ruled out.
Now, with EPIC 204278916 displaying similar but even more extreme behavior, scientists are forced to rethink their assumptions.
A New Hypothesis Emerges
The latest theory, proposed by the German research team, suggests that EPIC 204278916 may be surrounded by a protoplanetary disk—a dense ring of gas and dust typically seen around young stars.
This disk, if aligned edge-on relative to Earth, could intermittently block the star’s light while remaining invisible to infrared telescopes, which normally detect heat signatures from cosmic dust.
This could explain why we don’t see excess heat radiation from EPIC 204278916, even though something huge seems to be in orbit around it.
Could Tabby’s Star Be the Same?
What makes this discovery even more intriguing is that KIC 8462852—or Tabby’s Star—could be experiencing the same phenomenon.
Originally thought to be hundreds of millions of years old, new research suggests that it could actually be much younger, like EPIC 204278916.
If that’s the case, then maybe both stars are surrounded by edge-on circumstellar disks, creating similar dimming effects.
And even if Tabby’s Star is older, older stars can host rings of cometary debris that might mimic the appearance of a protoplanetary disk.
Ethan Siegel, an astrophysicist and science communicator, argues that if both of these stars share this phenomenon, we might be witnessing a new stage of stellar evolution that was previously unknown.
What’s Next?
The study on EPIC 204278916 has yet to go through full peer review, but it has been published on arXiv.org, a preprint server where researchers can share new findings for community evaluation.
Meanwhile, NASA’s Kepler telescope is set to make new observations of EPIC 204278916 next year, and astronomers are also planning a full-year observation campaign on Tabby’s Star using the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network.
If these observations confirm that protoplanetary or circumstellar disks are causing the dimming, it could rewrite what we know about young stars and planetary system formation.
But if no such disks are found?
Then we may have to entertain even more radical possibilities—ones that could challenge everything we think we know about the universe.
Final Thoughts
For now, the mystery of EPIC 204278916 remains unsolved.
Whether it’s a cosmic dust cloud, a swarm of unknown celestial objects, or something entirely new, one thing is clear:
The universe still has plenty of secrets left to unveil.
And who knows? Maybe one day, we’ll look back at this moment and realize that we were standing on the edge of a scientific revolution—one that changed our understanding of the cosmos forever.
