Planetary securityAliens may be building megastructures around a star to harvest energy: Astrophysicists
There is something strange happening with a star named KIC 8462852, leading astronomers to suggest that perhaps what we are witnessing is a huge alien megastructure being built around the star. Scientists last year said that KIC 8462852 appeared to be getting darker with no clear or obvious explanation. Some went on to suggest that the flickering and dimming of the star were the result of an alien megastructure being built around it. The purpose of the megastructure? Energy harvesting.
Visual concepy of a Dyson sphere // Source: theconversation.com
There is something strange happening with a star named KIC 8462852, leading astronomers to suggest that perhaps what we are witnessing is a huge alien megastructure being built around the star.
Gizmodo reports that scientists last year said that KIC 8462852 appeared to be getting darker with no clear or obvious explanation. Some went on to suggest that the flickering and dimming of the star were the result of an alien megastructure being built around it. The purpose of the megastructure? Energy harvesting.
Other astronomers, though, argued that the unusual flickering and dimming may be the result of comets or other debris passing around the front of the star, obscuring it from our view .
A new paper examines the different explanations, and concludes that all previous astrophysical models cannot account for the way that the light coming from the star is behaving. “No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve,” the authors, Caltech’s Ben Montet and the Carnegie Institute’s Joshua Simon, write.
“We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real,” Montet told Gizmodo. “We just weren’t able to.”
The study’s authors used Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope to look at how brightly the star shone. They found that it dipped by about 0.34 percent per year during the first 1,000 days it was under observation, and then dipped by more than 2 percent in the next 200 days.
The researchers say that this rate of dimming cannot be explained by any of the leading hypothesis, which say that the dimming could be explained by comet swarms passing in front of the star, or by the effects of a warped star.
The paper does not offer evidence for the primary – and tantalizing — competing explanation: that an alien race is erecting a megastructure like a Dyson sphere around the star. But the argument the authors advance means that scientists will have to examine it more carefully in order to refute, or support, it.
The authors note that even if scientists prove that the star’s flickering and dimming are not the result of alien megastructures, the fact remains that these phenomena are something that has not been seen before.
Gizmodonotes that it may be a combination of different things — potentially previous explanations – which have combined to create the unusual behavior.
Montet and Simon compared their data with 193 nearby stars and 355 stars that are similar to KIC 8462852, and found nothing similar to the odd behavior.
The alien megastructures explanation for the star’s odd behavior was advanced last year. At the time, astronomer Jason Wright told the Independent: “I can’t figure this thing out and that’s why it’s so interesting, so cool – it just doesn’t seem to make sense.”
He told the Atlantic that while aliens should always be the “very last hypothesis you consider,” what he had spotted “looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build”.
— Read more in Benjamin T. Montet and Joshua D. Simon, “KIC 8462852 Faded Throughout the Kepler Mission,” Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (3 August 2016)
