Odd signals from a distant star are defying natural explanation.
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The KIC 4150611 light curve looks kind of similar to the ones produced by Kepler for KIC 8462852, Howell said.
KIC 8462852 is almost 1,500 light-years or more than 88 trillion miles away from Earth. Specifically, an alien megastructure built by an alien civilization, such as perhaps a massive array of orbiting solar panels, something we humans would love to be able to pull off but aren’t quite technologically advanced to do so. The best non-alien explanation is that a passing star possibly left behind a huge swarm of comets that are now circling this star, but that doesn’t seem like a very plausible explanation either.
It has been remarkably successful adding thousands of planets to the known roster.
This chart shows the light curve for KIC 8462852, observed by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.
Irregular light patterns were detected coming from the star, one of 160,000 being studied by Kepler in its effort to detect a drop in light patterns signaling the passage of an orbiting Earth-like planet in front of the star.
Astronomers noticed that the KIC 8462852 has dimmed strangely and irregularly several times over the past four years. Yet Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is only one-tenth the diameter of the Sunday. Astronomical observers are constantly looking for tiny glimmers of information in the mess of noise that streams through space toward Earth, and often, things that at first look like signals end up being mirages. So it can not be a planet.
“We’d never seen anything like this star”, Boyajian was quoted as saying in The Atlantic magazine. And these are where the aliens come in.
But, Jason Wright, from Penn State University, is preparing his own paper at the moment which reads light patterns as being an indication of extraterrestrial civilization.
The search for signs of life in a mysterious star system hypothesized to potentially harbor an “alien megastructure” is now underway.
This is not the first time that astronomers have speculated about aliens when confronted with an unexplained phenomenon.
The senior astronomer cited the example of pulsars or highly magnetised and rotating neutron stars, discovered in the 1960s after initially being suspected as alien transmissions. What she found, though, was a series of regular pulses, always from the same part of the sky, that she labeled LGM-1: Little Green Men.
When hugely powerful gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) continued to defy explanation decades after their discovery, a few suggested they could be the optical equivalent of a sonic boom, taking place because alien starships were accelerating to warp speed. The GRBs were eventually discovered to be exploding stars.
This, of course, is nearly certainly poppycock.
Still, it’s an interesting possibility, and one many scientists feel is worth looking into. Instead, the probe saw a more erratic dimming and brightening of the star, nothing like what you’d expect to see when a planet eclipses.
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Also, if something is absorbing 20 percent of a star’s light, it is going to get hot and that means it is going to re-radiate that energy at infrared wavelengths but, as mentioned, no IR-excess has been detected.
