Comets can't explain weird 'alien megastructure' star after all
One possibility not mentioned is that the expert who eyeballed the old photographic plates to determine that there was a slight dimming did not do so under double blind conditions, and his assessment is tainted.I don't mean to suggest this supports one hypothesis or another. But I'm not convinced his opinion on the dimming is so valuable if it was done without proper controls. There may very well have been proper controls, but unfortunately that didn't come through in the article.