Some scientists are getting very excited about potential megastructures they believe may be evidence of an advanced civilization.
Astronomers discovered what they believe may be megastructures orbiting around a star near the Milky Way using the Kepler Space Telescope.
“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Jason Wright told The Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build.”
Wright is an astronomer from Penn State University who is gearing up to publish a report on the star system, suggesting it contains megastructures built by advanced life.
The star, named KIC 8462852, lies just above our galaxy, between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra. Scientists first took notice of the star system in 2009, when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having earth-like planets.
Kepler analyzes light from distant planets looking for changes that take place when planets move. KIC8462852 does not seem to have a normal pattern.
“We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out,” said Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale.
In 2011 the star was singled out again, this time by members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team, which found the star “interesting” and “bizarre” due to it being surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.
Despite many hypotheses, scientists were unable to explain a natural phenomenon that could account for the matter. That’s when Wright and Andrew Siemion, Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) began looking at the system. Now scientists are seriously considering that this matter may have been purposely created by intelligent creatures.
Scientists have even hypothesized that these structures could be giant solar panels used to derive energy from the star. Astronomers now want to point a radio dish at the star and listen for signs of an advanced civilization.
“If things go really well, the follow-up could happen sooner,” Wright told The Atlantic. “If we saw something exciting… we’d be asking to go on right away.”