Steve Howell, researcher involved in the Kepler mission, acknowledged that the star’s freaky light signature sparked alien-civilization debate amid scientific community.
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NASA’s Kepler space telescope was finding that KIC 8462852 had a few weird qualities to it: it was dimming dramatically several times in recent years, which were far too massive to have been caused by just a planet crossing over its face.
“We are looking at it with the Allen Telescope Array”, Seth Shostak said, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California. The lack of a detectable signal, after all, does not establish that KIC 8462852 is a lifeless system. “If there’s somebody out there, there are going to be so many of them out there that I do think there’s a chance”.
“We’d never seen anything like this star”, Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral student at Yale University was quoted as saying. It emits a “very unusual transit signal”, making scientists wonder whether that is due to “alien megastructures“, according to HNGN.
Another hypothesis about the light fluctuations is that it might be caused by swarm of comets that may be orbiting KIC 8462852.
The Program employs publicly accessible astronomical data gathered by NASA’s Kepler Telescope, which tracks extra-solar Earth-like planets by observing the intermittent dimming of stars, a phenomenon typically indicative of such planets drifting by.
Shostack acknowledges there are many natural phenomena that could block a star’s light, meaning it is unlikely that aliens are responsible for the unusual light patterns.
However, Mr. Shostak cautioned that conspiracy theorists should “perhaps moderate their enthusiasm with the lessons of history”.
“It definitely appears to be a normal exoplanet or binary star light curve”. Therefore, any alien race that may be detected in the future could utilize the superstructure idealized by scientists Freeman Dyson.
The Allen Telescope Array runs day and night and will alert scientists if they pick up wavelengths that could be consistent with coming from a technological source.
Researchers will first look for radio waves emanating from the star. Just months ago, the organization received a large injection from a Russian Internet billionaire named Yuri Milner, Popular Mechanics reports. Now we’re officially looking for intelligent life out there.
“SETI has looked and so far come up empty”, Howell said.
In addition, while Howell doesn’t discount that, there could be life in space; this probably isn’t the moment when people will discover it. However, that begin said, Shostak went on to say that even if this star doesn’t point us to an alien civilization, there likely is one elsewhere in the universe, and SETI will be chasing down many other leads over the coming years.
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