STUDY OF KIC 8462852 LIGHT CURVE FLUCTUATIONS USING TRANSIT MODELING

• Main Author: Graciela Josie Harianto, Yemima
• Format: Final Project
• Language: Indonesia
• Online Access: https://digilib.itb.ac.id/gdl/view/72903
• Institution: Institut Teknologi Bandung

KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s Star or Boyajian’s Star, is a star with spectral class F3 and luminosity class V located in the constellation Cygnus, about 1470 light years from Earth. KIC 8462852 has a mass of about 1.43 M? with a radius of 1.58 R? and a luminosity of 4.86 L?, is a celestial object that has attracted a lot of attention in the astronomical community because photometric data from the Kepler spacecraft in 2009 revealed that the brightness of KIC 8462852 undergoes aperiodic dimming up to 20%. The dimming profile of this light curve is asymmetric with a long duration, from 5 to 100 days. Various scenarios have been studied to explain these events, which are not caused by instrument and data processing artifacts; it was concluded that the dimming was caused by astrophysical events. The proposed scenarios include: the presence of a ringed exoplanet with debris orbiting the parent star, the existence of an exocomet population, and the presence of a dust population. The scenario that comes closest to the results of various observations is the transit of a number of objects distributed in orbits around the star KIC 8462852. To examine this, transit modeling is carried out through generating the mass and size distribution of the collision model and the spatial Gaussian distribution along the orbit trajectory of the object population. This study explores five variations of the physical and orbital distributions, the results of which show the dimming curve of the light curve of the parent star KIC 8462852 with certain features. The features of the light curve resulting from the transit model do not reach the level of dimming as found in the observations. The main characters of the light curve feature cannot be generated from this transit modeling. However, the variation values of the distributions determined in this study can be a first step in determining the physical and orbital properties of objects, such as a larger inclination distribution and a larger number of objects involved in the simulation.