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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

Published: 19:58 EST, 13 October 2015 | Updated: 02:32 EST, 14 October 2015

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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.

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KIC 8462852, located 1480 light-years away, and has produced a series of bizarre light fluctuations researchers have not been able to conclusively explain.

'We'd never seen anything like this star,' Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic.

HOW COULD ALIENS HARNESS THE POWER OF ENTIRE STARS?

A proposed method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere.

First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.

They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm.

If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth.

But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected.

Source: All About Space magazine

'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.

'By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event.'

However, some experts say the real cause could be something far more exciting.

'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.

One theory for an advanced alien race is that they might harness the power of an entire star, known as a Dyson Sphere (illustrated). However, if such a structure existed, it is theorised that we would be able to detect its infrared signature - but a recent study found no such evidence

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.

The 100 metre Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia (above) will help the scientists make the most extensive serach of the universe for signs of intelligent life yet conducted. The team hope to get time on it to further examine the mysterious star.

'Whether an advanced spacefaring civilization uses the large amounts of energy from its galaxy's stars to power computers, space flight, communication, or something we can't yet imagine, fundamental thermodynamics tells us that this energy must be radiated away as heat in the mid-infrared wavelengths,' Wright said.

'This same basic physics causes your computer to radiate heat while it is turned on.'

THE FRUITLESS SEARCH FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL INTELLIGENCE

Scientists have been searching for signs of intelligent life in the cosmos under the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) programme since the 1960s.

Initially it was conducted on the fringe of radio astronomy, with just short amounts of time obtained on relatively small radio telescopes.

However, in 1984 the Seti Institute was established to provide a coordinated approach to the search, using radio telescopes as permanent ‘ears’ to listen for alien signals.

The project however suffered a set back in 1994 when Nasa funding to Seti was cut and it now seeks support from private sources instead.

The project has yet to detect any positive signs of signals from intelligent life, but some scientists have predicted it could happen within the next 20 years.

However, the project has also been criticised for being overly optimistic despite not receiving any signals in the past 30 years.

Recently scientists proposed taking a more active approach by broadcasting signals to nearby stars in the hope of getting a response.