Science
Scientists have discovered a jumbled group of objects orbiting a distant star that defies natural explanations.
Between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra lies perhaps the strangest and most mysterious star in our galaxy. The star, named KIC 8462852, may not be unusual on its own.
However, astronomers have discovered something strange in its orbit: a cluster of irregularly shaped objects that appear unnatural, and most likely alien.
The star was first spotted by astronomers using the Kepler Space Telescope in 2011 due to a distinctive dimming. Scientists usually detect distant planets by the dimming that occurs when planets pass in front of the star, blocking some of the light it emits.
The star KIC 8462852 in the Milky Way galaxy
The dimming of KIC 8462852 was unlike any of the more than 150,000 stars analyzed by Kepler. The dimming structure suggests that the star is surrounded by a group of densely located objects.
“We haven't seen anything like this star,” Tabetha Boyajian explained. “It was really weird. We thought the data was wrong, but we checked it all out.”
The researchers emphasized that the objects had an irregular shape. This is not something that forms naturally, but as if it were left there recently, otherwise the objects would be located systematically or would be absorbed by the gravitational field by now.
Read also: 10 reasons we still haven't found aliens
So what could it be? Scientists took into account several scenarios, ranging from instrument defects to clusters of asteroids in the asteroid belt or the collision of planets.
However, so far the list of possible changes has been reduced to two options. According to the first assumption, another star drew a number of comets close to KIC 8462852, but this would be more of an incredible and rare event that has never been observed in other stars.
The second option is that the objects are not of natural origin and are alien.
Alien civilizations
“Aliens were the last thing you could think of, but it looked like it was built by an alien civilization,” said astronomer Jason Wright.
In other words, they could be megastructures installed by alien beings, which could give us our first glimpse of extraterrestrial technologies.
Representatives of the SETI project to search for extraterrestrial civilizations proposed to point a radio dish at an unusual star and find out if it emits radio waves at a frequency that indicates technological activity. If such waves are detected, things will take a serious turn.
The first observations are scheduled to take place before January, and a follow-up study will be carried out depending on the measurements.