An alien star in distant space seems to be acting very strangely.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope caught sight of the star as part of the spacecraft's hunt for planets outside the solar system, which are also known as exoplanets.
Kepler looks for exoplanets by seeing a dip in the light of a star, presumably when a planet passes between its host star and the spacecraft. This eclipse produces a regular, periodic dip in the starlight that can help scientists characterize the planet.
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But when Kepler caught sight of this star — called KIC 8462852 — it didn't see anything resembling a regular, periodic dip in starlight. 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.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc researcher at Yale told the Atlantic, one of the first publications to report on the finding. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
So, what could this weird star be?
Numerous media outlets, including, to some extent, The Atlantic, have latched onto the idea that it could be an “alien megastructure” constructed by an extraterrestrial civilization orbiting that star. Such a structure would be large enough to periodically block light from the star.
But the truth is that scientists aren't yet sure what could be causing the star to flicker from our perspective, and an “alien megastructure” is pretty far down on their list of possible explanations for the light curve.
“It’s kind of funny, I don’t really know how this ended up going from weird dips in a light curve to alien structures,” “It’s kind of funny, I don’t really know how this ended up going from weird dips in a light curve to alien structures,” Kepler scientist Steve Howell told Mashable in an interview.
“The alien hypothesis should be a last resort. Something we consider for fun rather than out of seriousness,” MIT exoplanet scientist Sara Seager told Mashable in an email.
In reality, there could be other, very cool explanations for why the star seems so odd.
Some people have suggested that there could be a huge swarm of comets surrounding the star, causing its light to dip in and out from Kepler’s perspective.
A planet that has broken up in orbit around the star, Howell added, could even cause the odd light dips.
Howell was also reminded of another star system he and his colleagues working with Kepler have been studying recently. The strange solar system — named KIC 4150611 — appears to be made up of five stars orbiting one another, a kind of star system never before observed.
“While that’s an unusual system, it’s certainly not aliens. It’s just stars,” Howell said.
The KIC 4150611 light curve looks kind of similar to the ones produced by Kepler for KIC 8462852, Howell said.
Howell and his colleagues haven’t yet published their findings, but they hope to in the near future.
The KIC 8462852 findings, which have set off the media speculation, were first detailed in a study that has been submitted for publication to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, though it has not yet gone all the way through the peer review process.
The discoveries were made, in part, thanks to a group of citizen scientists working with Planet Hunters to comb through Kepler data.
The initial study didn’t mention any kind of “alien megastructure,” Howell said. The authors instead opted to discuss some more mundane — and more likely — possibilities for what they were seeing in their data.
The first study led to another not-yet-peer-reviewed paper posted to arxiv.org. That website is a repository of electronic preprints, known as e-prints, of scientific papers in fields from mathematics to biology, all of which can be accessed for free.
These papers have not yet been fully peer previewed, however, which means their findings should be treated as preliminary.
The second paper that appeared on arxiv mentioned what a structure built by aliens might look like and how it might relate to KIC 8462852, but — and this is a crucial detail — that study also made it clear that "it's aliens" was got a good explanation for the light curve.
Howell has offered to take some photos of KIC 8462852 when his team uses a ground-based observatory for other observations next week. This could help clear up the mystery of exactly what’s going on with that star system.
“In science, I think that we believe Arxiv papers are nice, but if they’re not refereed and accepted, then you always have a little skepticism about them or a little concern,” Howell said. “I don’t think [this] paper falls into the ‘crap’ category, but it’s not yet accepted, so we have to take the results that are in it with a little bit of a grain of salt.”
For Howell, all the talk of possible alien structures seen by Kepler hits oddly close to home.
Howell recently edited a book of short stories called "A Kepler’s Dozen: Thirteen Stories About Distant Worlds That Really Exist," which includes a story eerily like this one.
The short tale involves a group of aliens that uses giant, opaque sails to block out the light from their sun in order to send messages to other civilizations. This alien race generates a kind of “Morse Code” that other civilizations can interpret by reading the light curve produced by the dips.
“It’s really fun because now it’s like the science fiction story has come true in a sense," Howell said.
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