Have researchers discovered an alien megastructure?

Bizarre star could be surrounded by a Dyson sphere built by extraterrestrials, researchers claim !

  • KIC 8462852 is located 1480 light-years away from Earth
  • Has produced a series of bizarre light fluctuations team cannot explain
  • One theory is that a vast megastructure is obscuring the light from it

Researchers have revealed a ‘bizarre’ star they say could be surrounded by a huge alien mega structure. KIC 8462852, located 1,480 light-years away, was monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope for more than four years, beginning in 2009. Now researchers say they cannot explain strange fluctuations in the light it emits – leading some to claim it could have a huge alien megastructure in front of it.

Alien planet alamongordo - http://www.alamongordo.com

‘It was really weird. ‘We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.’ She recently published a paper in the online journal arxiv outlining the possible causes – and discounting many of them. ‘Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level,’Boyajian and her team at the crowdsourced astronomy site planet hunters found.

There, researchers flagged the star as bizarre as early as 2011. ‘The dipping activity can last for between 5 and 80 days,’ they say. The team also looked at possible explanations, such as faulty data or a recent collision. ‘In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the mysterious events in the Kepler light curve, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand,’ they wrote.

‘Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,’ Penn State astronomer Jason Wright told The Atlantic, ‘but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.’ Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a ‘swarm of megastructures,’ perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

Wright is now working with the SETI Institute in Berkeley and Boyajian to develop a proposal to point a large radio telescope (either the NRAO’s Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia or the Parkes Observatory scope in Australia) at the star, and listen for a ‘hum’ of alien technology.

SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. ‘The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths,’ Wright has said of his research.

Read the full article @ DailyMail