Other scientists believe it could be comets or an asteroid belt – but SETI now aims to point radio telescopes towards the star to “listen” for the distinctive radio buzz of life. The debris could be the remains of comets dragged into the star’s orbit by another star that came exceptionally close, according to researchers.
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Because of its freakish light fluctuations, which scientists are at odds to explain, a group of their peers now insist that a huge alien megastructure has been built and is blocking the star.
The oddity has persisted for more than four years under observation by Kepler.
The unusual star is named KIC 8462852 and it exhibits tiny dips in light emitting from it. This light pattern has not been spotted anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. “We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out”.
Tabetha Boyajian oversees Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by stars from their homes.
Kepler’s been scanning stars since 2009, looking for a slight dim in the light as planets transit between their host star and our view. However, by its conclusion, it had discounted many of them.
“I was fascinated by how insane it looked”, Wright told The Atlantic.
Conversely the Star’s light does not have the normal patterns of a mature Star.
According to astronomer Jason Wright from Penn University, these structures could have been designed by aliens to draw energy from the star.
“It’s hard to imagine how comets could block that much light”.
Wright and his co-authors are about to publish a theory that the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures”.
He said: “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build”.
Researchers for SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), including Tabetha, James and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California are planning to take their research one step further.
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The second paper will use a radio dish to gather wavelengths from the star and search for those that could be associated with technological civilization, according to The Independent.
