Strange signals from a distant star are defying natural explanation. There is a remote chance that they could be from an ‘alien megastructure’
There’s a new mystery in the universe and it goes by the name KIC 8462852. It is a star approximately 1500 light years away from the Earth, and displays a strange pattern of dimming that has astronomers scratching their heads.
With many natural causes apparently ruled out, there is even the suggestion that the signals could be caused by a giant structure, built in space near the star, presumably by extraterrestrials.
The unexplained signals have been found in data collected by Nasa’s Kepler Space Telescope. The mission was launched in 2009 and was designed to find planets by looking for the small dip in light caused when a planet passes in front of the star and blocks a small portion of the light.
It has been remarkably successful adding thousands of planets to the known roster. But in all the 150,000 stars that Kepler has monitored, none have ever looked like KIC 8462852. It stands out because the star dims so dramatically.
Whereas a planet will drop the light by a percent or two at most, this star dims by up to 20 percent. Also unlike a planet, which orbits the star and causes the drop to repeat, these dimmings took place at random intervals during the 1600 days that Kepler was monitoring the star.
Around the 800-day mark, the star’s light dropped by 15 percent, Then around the 1500-day mark, there was a flurry of dimming with one dropping 20 percent of the starlight. To fall that much, the object passing in front of the star must be almost half the diameter of the star. Yet Jupiter, the largest planet in our solar system, is only one-tenth the diameter of the Sun.
To rub salt into the wound, KIC 8462852, is estimated to be about 1.5 times larger than the sun, making the necessary object vast indeed. So it cannot be a planet.
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