Have researchers discovered an alien MEGASTRUCTURE?

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.

'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.

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. 

(dailymail.co.uk)