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[gutshot]

Researchers have found unusual light patterns from a star approximately 1480 light years away. It could be a completely natural occurrence... or it could be an alien civilization. From The Atlantic:

The Kepler Space Telescope collected a great deal of light from all of those stars it watched. So much light that Kepler’s science team couldn’t process it all with algorithms. They needed the human eye, and human cognition, which remains unsurpassed in certain sorts of pattern recognition. Kepler’s astronomers decided to found Planet Hunters, a program that asked “citizen scientists” to examine light patterns emitted by the stars, from the comfort of their own homes.

In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching.

The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation. That would be expected if the star were young. When our solar system first formed, four and a half billion years ago, a messy disk of dust and debris surrounded the sun, before gravity organized it into planets, and rings of rock and ice.

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.

Boyajian, the Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing the star’s bizarre light pattern. Several of the citizen scientists are named as co-authors. The paper explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.

The paper finds each explanation wanting, save for one. If another star had passed through the unusual star’s system, it could have yanked a sea of comets inward. Provided there were enough of them, the comets could have made the dimming pattern.

But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.

When I spoke to 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.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth’s network of radio stations.

Link to the published paper: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf

There is probably a natural explanation for the case of this mysterious star. The universe is a strange place with a lot of natural phenomena. But what if it isn't?

UPDATE: Phil Plait of the Bad Astronomer blog weighs in: http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astr...ge_dips_in_brightness_are_a_bit_baffling.html

Which brings us back to KIC 8462852. What if we caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building such an artifact? Huge panels (or clusters of them) hundreds of thousands of kilometers across, and oddly-shaped, could produce the dips we see in that star’s light.

Now I imagine some of you might expect me to rail against this idea, call it ridiculous, and pooh-pooh the notion of aliens and all that.

Well, surprise! I actually kinda like it. I’m not saying it’s right, mind you, just that it’s interesting. Wright isn’t some wild-eyed crackpot; he’s a professional astronomer with a solid background. As he told me when I talked to him over the phone, there’s “a need to hypothesize, but we should also approach it skeptically” (paraphrasing a tweet by another astronomer, David Grinspoon), with which I wholeheartedly agree.

UPDATE 2: SETI has confirmed they will be investigating the star, although no specific timeframe is given:

The SETI Institute ‏@SETIInstitute Oct 17
Star KIC 8462852 is in the news. Its dimming might be due to alien constructions. Hang tight: The Allen Telescope Array is looking.

UPDATE 3: Jason Wright, the astronomer behind the extraterrestrials theory, has posted a blog post due to the increasing media coverage surrounding his hypothesis.

He also went ahead and published his paper on the subject, despite it not being accepted just yet: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.04606

We have in KIC 8462 a system with all of the hallmarks
of a Dyson swarm (Section 2.1.3): aperiodic events of almost
arbitrary depth, duration, and complexity. Historically,
targeted SETI has followed a reasonable strategy of
spending its most intense efforts on the most promising
targets. Given this object’s qualitative uniqueness, given
that even contrived natural explanations appear inadequate,
and given predictions that Kepler would be able
to detect large alien megastructures via anomalies like
these, we feel is the most promising stellar SETI target
discovered to date. We suggest that KIC 8462 warrants
significant interest from SETI in addition to traditional
astrophysical study, and that searches for similar, less
obvious objects in the Kepler data set are a compelling
exercise

UPDATE 4: SETI reports they did not find any signs of extraterrestrial life intentionally beaming signals to Earth. This does not definitively mean that no intelligent life exists around KIC 8462. Any signals that would be detectable by us would have to be very strong and pointed directly at us. We would not be able to detect what would be a typical amount of radio signals emitted by an ET civilization, given the vast distance.

UPDATE 5:

So, KIC 8462852 is even weirder than Kepler saw:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256

From the early 1890s to the late 1980s, KIC 8462852 has faded by 0.193+-0.030 mag. This century-long dimming is completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star. So the Harvard light curve provides the first confirmation (past the several dips seen in the Kepler light curve alone) that KIC 8462852 has anything unusual going on.

[...]

Within the context of dust-occultation models, the century-long dimming trend requires 10^4 to 10^7 times as much dust as for the one deepest Kepler dip. Within the context of the comet-family idea, the century-long dimming trend requires an estimated 648,000 giant comets (each with 200 km diameter) all orchestrated to pass in front of the star within the last century.

UPDATE 6: The author of the original paper, Tabby Boyajian, just received funding via Kickstarter to observe the star for a whole year to hopefully watch a dip in real time. This should give us some more info.

This Kickstarter project will secure observing time on a global network of ground-based telescopes so we can catch the star when its brightness dips again. When will the dips occur? What will the dips look like? How long will they last? And last but not least, what is it passing in front of the star to make these dips?

Only with these new data, and the answers to these questions, will we be able to test theories out on what is happening around this star!

We have initiated observations on the Las Cumbres Observatory Global Telescope Network (LCOGT). LCOGT is a privately run global telescope network specifically designed for time domain astronomy, meaning that their network of telescopes is positioned strategically around the globe to ensure continuous monitoring of an object.

Our observation plan is as follows. From the 4 years of Kepler data, we know that the dips in the light curve are not periodic, so we need continuous monitoring throughout the year since we cannot predict when it will dip again. We also know that how much the brightness drops is also variable from dip-to-dip. The LCOGT data will not have the precision Kepler had, but will have plenty of sensitivity to detect the observed dips in this star.

What’s more, since we are observing this star from the ground we are also able to tailor our observation plan to reveal detailed information on whatever object(s) are passing in front of the star to make the dips! One way this will be done is by observing the star at different wavelengths, or colors, of light. These new observations will monitor the star’s brightness at an assortment of colors!

In addition to this, the data from the LCOGT are processed in real time, so when data are seen to pass below a brightness threshold, it will trigger more observations in the LCOGT network. Our science team will then alert for observations to be taken at larger facilities to get a better look.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/608159144/the-most-mysterious-star-in-the-galaxy

UPDATE 7:

more evidence in the "star's fucking weird" column:

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.01316

We obtain accurate relative photometry of KIC 8462852 from the Kepler full frame images, finding that the brightness of KIC 8462852 monotonically decreased over the four years it was observed by Kepler. Over the first ~1000 days, KIC 8462852 faded approximately linearly at a rate of 0.341 +/- 0.041 percent per year, for a total decline of 0.9%. KIC 8462852 then dimmed much more rapidly in the next ~200 days, with its flux dropping by more than 2%. For the final ~200 days of Kepler photometry the magnitude remained approximately constant, although the data are also consistent with the decline rate measured for the first 2.7 yr. Of a sample of 193 nearby comparison stars and 355 stars with similar stellar parameters, 0.6% change brightness at a rate as fast as 0.341 +/- 0.041 percent per year, and none exhibit either the rapid decline by >2% or the cumulative fading by 3% of KIC 8462852. We examine whether the rapid decline could be caused by a cloud of transiting circumstellar material, finding while such a cloud could evade detection in sub-mm observations, the transit ingress and duration cannot be explained by a simple cloud model. Moreover, this model cannot account for the observed longer-term dimming. No known or proposed stellar phenomena can fully explain all aspects of the observed light curve.

UPDATE 8: This star gets even weirder. Even more dimming has been discovered. From New Scientist:

They found that for the first 1000 days of the Kepler mission, Tabby’s star decreased in brightness at roughly 0.34 per cent a year – twice as fast as measured by Schaefer. What’s more, over the next 200 days, the star’s brightness dropped another 2.5 per cent before beginning to level out. It was a much more rapid change than before.

That means the star undergoes three types of dimming: the deep dips that first made it famous, the relatively slow decline observed by Schaefer and verified by Montet and Simon, and the intermediate rapid decline that occurred over a few hundred days.

“We can come up with scenarios that explain one or maybe two of these, but there’s nothing that nicely explains all three,” says Montet.

 

[Dennis]

I think they want us to come and find them.

 

[Escalario]

But are they ancient? If not, might as well not bother.

 

[uncelestial]

 

[Sapiens]

Would be incredible if true.

 

[Log4Girlz]

I'm not saying it's aliens. .. but it's aliens.

 

[massoluk]

Were the patterns in prime numbers?

 

[Shmuppers]

Really, really reads like baseless conjecture.

But hey, wouldn't it be cool?

Edit: oh, wow, the report.

 

[ponpo]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere

They think it's this?

 

[GrotesqueBeauty]

Why exactly would intelligent life not fall under the umbrella of potential natural explanations?

 

[ponpo]

Why exactly would intelligent life not fall under the umbrella of potential natural explanations?

Why are man made structures not considered natural?

 

[WillyFive]

Why exactly would intelligent life not fall under the umbrella of potential natural explanations?

That would make it artificial, no?

 

[Herbs]

awesome

 

[Log4Girlz]

What if it's a message from the future. Like If love was used to transcend time and space, traveling to our dimension.

 

[John Kowalski]

they know

 

[GrotesqueBeauty]

Why are man made structures not considered natural?

If culture and technology are recurrent features in the universe at large I would consider them natural. The distinction as we make it in regards to human artifacts is fuzzy anyway.

 

[Servbot #42]

This movie is so damn good, i actually own it on blu ray and i'm tempted to watch it again. Anyway i wonder if by looking at this star we may not like what we see, if you know what i mean.

 

[Shadybiz]

Would be awesome if it's true...most likely it's not, but a man can dream.

 

[Thelonelykoopa]

 

[Log4Girlz]

If culture and technology are recurrent features in the universe at large I would consider them natural. The distinction as we make it in regards to human artifacts is fuzzy anyway.

Everything is in our reality so there's no such thing as unnatural, in fact it makes the word natural obsolete!

 

[LUFTRAUSER]

 

[Technosteve]

Dibs on the hot female aliens

 

[Zombine]

Dibs on the hot female aliens

Curves for dayssss

 

[Ovid]

It begins

 

[wanderingprostheyltite]

Mmmhmm

 

[Angry Grimace]

Dibs on the hot female aliens

My guess is that you're going to be facing stiff competition if this turns out to be pansexual blue alien girls.

 

[lastplayed]

It's so awesome we can detect things orbiting stars so far away.

 

[Wyndstryker]

They're building the invasion fleet.

We're doomed.

 

[GrotesqueBeauty]

Everything is in our reality so there's no such thing as unnatural, in fact it makes the word natural obsolete!

There is definitely a tinge of human ego at play in perceiving ourselves and our activities as distinctly separate and easily distinguishable from other natural phenomena. Of course the distinction exists in a general sense for practical reasons, but it starts to break down when you try to pinpoint it. Are nests unnatural? Webs? Animals which use objects as tools or crudlely manipulate instruments to change their environment or make acquiring food easier than biological function alone? As it happens most people attribute it to human activity alone, but at what level of manipulation?

Also, I would take issue with the idea that "everything is within our reality", assuming "our" means whatever falls in the realm of human perception, either immediate or aided by external tools. There is unequivocally more that falls outside our ability to apprehend than within it. Most people are fearful of admitting what a fingernail grip we have on the vastness of all that manifests (which is why so many people are erroneously convinced of abstract systems of logic as a catch all rather than a useful mechanism when applied within certain appropriate contexts).

The wider point though is that I don't see why intelligent activity should be considered the absolute least of all likely explanations compared with other phenomena in this instance given that it's precisely the conspicuousness of the patterns observed that marks it out as a worthy point of investigation. Which isn't to say any one conclusion should be jumped to, just that I find it odd to say "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider".

 

[Gallbaro]

If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

 

[frontovik]

This movie is so damn good, i actually own it on blu ray and i'm tempted to watch it again. Anyway i wonder if by looking at this star we may not like what we see, if you know what i mean.

What movie is it?

 

[RyanDG]

If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

Unless they blew themselves up.

 

[Ovid]

What movie is it?

Contact

 

[jerry113]

So they're planning to point a giant radio dish to this strange formation.

Imagine if we hear something artificially made.

 

[Joey Fox]

If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

Or the civilizations that build Dyson spheres get their planets destroyed by the Ancient ones, while smart civilizations cower in fear.

 

[Ahasverus]

Researchers have found unusual light patterns from a star approximately 1480 light years away. It could be a completely natural occurrence... or it could be an alien civilization. From The Atlantic:

Bring them on! I want to die knowing we are not alone, it's all I wish for, that would change so many things for good.

 

[Ovid]

So they're planning to point a giant radio dish to this strange formation.

Imagine if we hear something artificially made.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxG5BgkfvP8

 

[AtomicShroom]

If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

Well we didn't have radios 1400 years ago now, did we? In fact it means we should be relatively safe for at least another 1300 years.

 

[Simon Belmont]

But that would be an extraordinary coincidence, if that happened so recently, only a few millennia before humans developed the tech to loft a telescope into space. That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.

That seems like a strange thing for an astronomer to say.

 

[gutshot]

Or the civilizations that build Dyson spheres get their planets destroyed by the Ancient ones, while smart civilizations cower in fear.

Or the Ancient Ones are a benevolent race that watches over fledgling civilizations until they too can harness the power of their star.

 

[Quazar]

One idea for SETI was to use data we gain from Kepler to hone in on high prospects. Hopefully they can find something from this

 

[Walpurgis]

It's probably nothing and even if it is something, what we're seeing is 1480 years old. There's no guarantee that it still exists.

If a civilization has the ability to create a Dyson ring 1400 years ago and we are not yet dead. Then the speed of light is a hard limit.

This is my concern as well.

 

[BowieZ]

That seems like a strange thing for an astronomer to say.

That point went way over my head. Can someone explain?

 

[Cooter]

We live in a truly remarkable time that stories like this are possible.

 

[Dan]

That seems like a strange thing for an astronomer to say.

I had the same thought, considering the number of stars being observed, let alone in totality, is it really so unlikely we might spot an instance of something like that?

 

[PSqueak]

Dibs on the hot female aliens

Female aliens? Please, open your mind, im sure actual aliens would totally defy all conceptions of sex and gender our brains can comprehend.

 

[alterno69]

I was thinking a couple of days ago, imagine for a second that you wake up tomorrow and every channel is showing the same images again and again and humans have concrete evidence of the existance of _______. Like footage of ________ coming down from the sky and walking among us.

What would be more shocking to you if you had two choices to fill in the blanks

Spoiler

God or aliens?

 

[Herne]

Haven't read the report yet, but maybe it's a debris disk? The star's name is KIC 8462852, if anyone is interested.

 

[Coins]

So I'm betting they already have beings that have infiltrated our society. Now that this story is going public and they know that we know, the plan will go into effect to eradicate us.

 

[lastplayed]

I had the same thought, considering the number of stars being observed, let alone in totality, is it really so unlikely we might spot an instance of something like that?

Yeah, it's like saying that the Shoemaker–Levy comet hitting Jupiter only a few centuries after we developed telescopes was an unlikely coincidence.

Unless I'm missing the point?