The search for an alien MEGASTRUCTURE: Radio telescope starts analysing 'bizarre' star that could be surrounded by a Dyson sphere built by extraterrestrials
- 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 begun an in depth study of a 'bizarre' star they say could be surrounded by a huge alien megastructure known as a Dyson sphere.
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 have secured time to point the Allen Telescope Array at the star.
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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.
The ATA is a system of radio dishes about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.
'We are looking at it with the Allen Telescope Array,' Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute in Mountain View, California, told space.com.
However, he warned the strange readings may not be caused by extraterrestrial megastructures, warning people 'should perhaps moderate their enthusiasm with the lessons of history.'
'So history suggests we're going to find an explanation for this that doesn't involve Klingons, if you will.'
Experts have been baffled by the readings.
'We'd never seen anything like this star,' Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told The Atlantic.
'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 ATA is a system of radio dishes about 300 miles (483 kilometers) northeast of San Francisco.
'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.'
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 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 known as Dyson Spheres.
First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, it is 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.
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.
'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.
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.
'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.'
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