This site may earn chapter commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

alien megastructures

There's a mystery afoot in the constellation Cygnus, and information technology's i we idea we had figured out. The star known as KIC 8462852 made news a few months ago when its unusual blueprint of dimming led some to speculate that intelligent life could be to blame — so-called "alien megastructures." The accepted explanation of its odd behavior was a swarm of dusty comets, only a new analysis calls that into question. So, what is going on around KIC 8462852?

The mystery begins when the Kepler space telescope surveyed KIC 8462852 (nearly 1480 light years away) in its search for potential exoplanets. Kepler uses the transit method to spot planets around distant stars. When an object (like a planet) passes between its parent star and Earth, there's a tiny driblet in luminance. By recording the frequency and magnitude of this driblet, we can infer things about the planet. KIC 8462852 wasn't behaving like a star with exoplanets, though. Information technology was flickering seemingly at random.

At that place were two explanations put forward for this unusual behavior. The first (and allow's face it, more plausible) was a swarm of dusty comets in orbit of the star that blocked some of its light. The more interesting hypothesis was the presence of alien megastructures in orbit of the star, perhaps designed to collect solar energy. Corking, correct? Unfortunately, neither of these ideas is holding upwards to more rigorous test.

Astronomer Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University used data from long-term observations taken at Harvard to track the beliefs of KIC 8462852. Perhaps there was more than going on than just the random dips in luminance? The university has photographic plates of the sky dating back more than than a century, and they show that the star dimmed by 20% between 1890 and 1989 — Schaefer even went to Harvard himself to ostend the data past reading the plates manually.

aliensBased on that new/old information, Schaefer calculated that in that location would demand to be 648,000 comets, each 200 kilometres wide in orbit of KIC 8462852. That's simply not plausible based on what we know about solar systems. Then what of the alien megastructure idea? Perhaps there's someone out there progressively building more than objects in orbit of KIC 8462852. Again, this doesn't fully explain the readings. Even if yous assume an alien guild has the power to build objects that block a fifth of the light from a star (mayhap on the manner to a Dyson Sphere?), in that location's no estrus signature from it. Anything that absorbs that much light should radiate some of that out as infrared.

KIC 8462852 is still a genuine mystery. Schaefer is conscientious not to rule out either of the proposed explanations, as there could exist some angle he and his team didn't consider. Whatever is going on, it requires more study.