Scientists said last year that the star, named KIC 8462852, appeared to be getting darker with no obvious explanation. Some suggested that the flickering and dimming was the result of an alien megastructure being built around it, to harvest energy.
But others said that the behaviour might just be happening as comets or other debris passed around the front of the star and obscured it from our view.
But a new paper looks at those explanations, and concludes that all previous models can’t 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. [...]
And even if they are able to prove that the star’s behaviour isn’t evidence of alien megastructures, it does appear to suggest that something is happening that hasn’t been seen before. It’s likely that it is a combination of different things – potentially previous explanations – that have added together to create the unusual behaviour. [...]
The alien megastructures explanation was advanced last year, when scientists spotted the strange behaviour and found no easy understanding of what is going on. Some suggested that an easy way of explaining the odd behaviour might be that an alien megastructure was being built.
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 civilisation to build”
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