Unusual light patterns around a distant star, which some took as evidence of an alien megastructure, were more likely caused by a swarm of cold comets.
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Alien enthusiasts should not lose all hope. In his own paper, he argued that the dimming is consistent with what would be expected of an alien megastructure – similar to the theorized Dyson Sphere – orbiting the star.
The story of KIC 8462852 appears far from over.
Star KIC 8462852 has been making the headlines ever since scientists speculated that its dimming is caused by alien infrastructures. An astro-engineering project refers to a structure at least the size of a planet.
Right off the bat, scientists said a swarm of comets was most likely to blame.
Will Marengo completely reject the megastructure theory?
Iowa State University associate professor of physics and astronomy Massimo Marengo first noticed the buzz around the mysterious star found by citizen scientists.
Image caption An illustration of NASA’s Kepler telescope which tracked down the unusual star.
Other scientists suggested that an asteroid may have been smashed up and be moving in front of it. Since then, scientists have been exploring the little data that they have in an attempt to find out what is blocking the light.
But KIC 8462852 was intriguing.
But when astronomers looked for infrared light near the star using the Spitzer Space Telescope, they found nothing.
When Prof. Marengo and colleagues studied the star with Spitzer infrared data from January this year – two years after the Kepler readings – they did not see much. If there had been some kind of catastrophe near the star, he said there would be a lot of dust and debris.
The authors concluded there were no excess infrared emissions, i.e.no sign of an asteroid belt collision, a dusty cloud of debris and rock, or a massive impact on a planet. The comets are thought to be traveling around the star in a very long, eccentric orbit. Such clouds would move off quickly, restoring the star’s brightness and leaving no trace of excess infrared emissions.
And the likelihood of an alien megastructure?
“We didn’t look for that”, Marengo said.
“We may not know yet what’s going on around this star”, Marengo says. Boyajian said, “We conducted numerous observations of the star and its environment, and our analysis characterizes the object as both remarkable (e.g., the “dipping” events in the Kepler light curve) and unremarkable (ground-based data reveal no deviation from a normal F-type star) at the same time”. It’s interesting when you have phenomena like that – typically it means there’s some new physical explanation or a new concept to be discovered’.
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A paper on the findings has been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
