LONDON: A team of astronomers has stumbled across what it believes could be a swarm of alien megastructures hidden millions of miles away.
The object in question is an unusual star, situated above the Milky Way, between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations.
A group of citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters program were examining data obtained from NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope when they noticed the bizarre light pattern of the star, called KIC 8462852.
Among the 150,000 stars examined by the Kepler Telescope, this is the only one to show light flickering irregularly with unparalleled dips in brightness.
Planet Hunters overseer Tabetha Boyajian said the light pattern suggested the star was being circled in tight formation by a large mess of matter.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” she told The Atlantic. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Ms Boyajian and a number of other astronomers recently published a paper offering natural scenarios that might explain the light pattern.
As dust and debris surrounded the sun when our solar system was first formed four and a half billion years ago, astronomers thought the pattern could have been from the emergence of a young star experiencing something similar.
However, as the star does not give off excess infra-red light, this theory was quickly scratched.
Another more likely theory is the event of another star passing through KIC 8462852’s system, bringing with it a large group of comets.
Shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup, faulty instruments and a planetary scale impact have also been listed as logical explanations for the anomaly.
However, Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright believes the answer is a little more extraterrestrial.
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