If that star would be the sun, the cut off of the flux would be, could be, caused by a smaller Uranus with a giant ring system like Saturn, orbiting just past Mars. Size of the dense rings, 15 million km. 1/10 the earth orbit radius. or a gravitational stable dust cloud. that size in that orbit.
Why is this thread in pseudoscience? It's a legitimate scientific question. This KIC 8462852 is a real mystery. It dims in brightness irregularly. But apparently Fourier analysis shows a number of periodicities embedded in the irregularity. So there may be more than one object transiting. The largest reductions in radiation flux are reportedly around 20% of the star's brightness. That's unheard of and unique. Whatever transiting object is doing that must have a huge surface area. My speculation is that maybe this thing has a brown dwarf in orbit around it. (A star-like object larger than a gas-giant planet but still too small to ignite thermonuclear reactions.) I'm curious whether they have any doppler wobble information on KIC 8462852. That data would give some indication of the mass of whatever objects are transiting.
It sounded good at the time, but apparently brown dwarfs aren't thought to be much larger than Jupiter in terms of diameter, they are just denser at their cores. In my last post I was thinking in terms of a large relatively diffuse sub-stellar object. So that speculation about what might be large enough to occult this star 20% might not succeed. Is there any spectral data that might suggest that KIC 8462852 isn't a single star at all, but two stars, one brighter than the other, orbiting each other very tightly? That's what they really need. Hopefully somebody is already following it up.
A ring system might be a very good hypothesis. But I'm not sure that an orbiting planetary ring system would be big enough. (Somebody who knows more than me will need to research how large they might theoretically grow.) Another speculation is that the star itself might have a huge Saturn-style ring system of its own. After all, a younger star's planetary-formation accretion disk would probably look like a giant ring system. Perhaps such a ring might periodically tilt in such a way as to obscure the star behind it. So what percentage of light falling on a ring would it reflect and what percentage would it transmit? An obvious difficulty with this idea is whether the movements of a star's own ring up and down from our perspective could possibly mimic the massive transit-like periodicities apparent with KIC 8462852.
The flux of the star dips by 20% and the shadow of the rings of Saturn seem to be quite opaque, projecting the full width at that shallow angle too, and since we are in pseudo science, perhaps all stars, our sun included, have their hyper resonance periods that shape their proto-planetary disks, and we caught KIC 84-- and AU mi in the act.
