| There's a comment [1] in the other reddit thread that somewhat rules this out. > That doesn't even make sense when you're flying within the Solar System. Stuff moves, so you have to fly towards where it's going to be, not where it is. > The star is far enough away to be treated as a point source, with its light forming an apparent cone with the Earth's diameter. It doesn't intuitively make sense, at least to me, that the ship would stay within that cone as it corrects for the motion of our Solar System (and its own) within our galaxy. Remember that this dimming effect has been observable for several decades. Then again, aliens don't have any obligation to make sense to us. [1] : https://www.reddit.com/r/Astronomy/comments/4waozn/new_paper... |
A while back I had a plan for a science fiction setting: an intergalactic ship is approach Earth. The people who sent it thought big, and as a result the ship has at its core an enclosed star (a miniature Dyson Sphere) as a gravitational anchor and power source, and round it is orbiting a vast swarm of asteroids and habitats with a few million times the living space of Earth, inside which civilisations endlessly rise and fall.
The plot centred around this thing going to make a class pass by Sol in a few years at 0.01c, with the gravitational effects pretty much dooming the Earth; so the current lead civilisation sends some ships on ahead to evacuate the Earth. (Big ships. I did the maths.)
The story never gelled, but I think it's plausible that my ship would produce these effects.
BTW, if this turns out to be true, I want credit.