Ross Andersen’s article for The Atlantic concerning an oddball star, designated KIC 8462852 (this is the link to the academic paper), roughly 1481 light years distant, is being noised across the Net:
But this unusual star isn’t young. If it were young, it would be surrounded by dust that would give off extra infrared light. There doesn’t seem to be an excess of infrared light around this star.
It appears to be mature.
And yet, there is this mess of objects circling it. A mess big enough to block a substantial number of photons that would have otherwise beamed into the tube of the Kepler Space Telescope. If blind nature deposited this mess around the star, it must have done so recently. Otherwise, it would be gone by now. Gravity would have consolidated it, or it would have been sucked into the star and swallowed, after a brief fiery splash. …
And yet, the explanation has to be rare or coincidental. After all, this light pattern doesn’t show up anywhere else, across 150,000 stars. We know that something strange is going on out there.
When I spoke to [postdoc Tabetha] Boyajian on the phone, she explained that her recent paper only reviews “natural” scenarios. “But,” she said, there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish an alternative interpretation of the light pattern. SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. 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.
Well, I gotta say, 150,000 stars is peanuts in this Universe – in the Milky Way galaxy, even. That bit of rhetoric fell flat for me.
But the rest is the stuff of dreams. Sure wish I was an astronomer working on that team. Or even the janitor. About all I can guess at this point is it’s not a Dyson sphere – although maybe we’re catching a glimpse of one under construction.
Now to wait for our wonder to be deflated …
