Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way [Archive]

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muxfolder

15th October 2015, 15:24

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

"I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," 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."

The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html

Delight

15th October 2015, 16:12

Fractal (the "as above so below, as within, so without") symmetry on every order of "size" seems IMO to be a given. In the understanding that consciousness is the "reality", there are many flavors of awareness, intention and experience IMO.

To me this quality of self organizing similarity (using sacred geometry and other "rules" of appearance) of the one is "reality" in this Universe... all aspects are alive and partaking of an individual physical experience.

We can see love this Universe in a grain of sand

https://encrypted-tbn3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSMQHPdHz3V_L0L2w6QjoP4w887NXBZ0a07Xvb6OLyW0FHeZS0S

https://parisapartment.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/grains-of-sands-2.jpg?w=490

see our selves as seen by the Sun and feel our being as beloved of the earth because our own parents are conscious of us and love us.

We are all related REALLY!!!
(all quotes from Gregory Sams (http://www.gregorysams.com/gregorys-story.html)):

When will they realise that stars are the intelligent aliens they are looking for?

We could easily assume that the hundreds of billions of stars living within a galaxy might be evenly, or randomly distributed. But that would be about as sensible as assuming that the one billion people living in India were all evenly, or randomly, distributed around the country. In fact, like us, stars live in stellar communities called clusters, with empty space between them. There might be a dozen or so, a few hundred, a few thousand or a few million stars in these groupings, rather like we get together in farms, villages, towns and cities. It seems unlikely that stars would have planning departments determining just where they can be, but they do like to be in close proximity to other stars.

Astronomers are able to detect and measure the vibrating wave energies transmitted by stars and galaxies throughout the Universe. This is done with all manner of high-tech equipment and lots of high-powered thinking. But what are they doing with all this information, with these electro-magnetic broadcasts made by Sun and other stars?

It is as if some alien entities, that knew only telepathic communication, were to pick up and analyse a radio talk show broadcast from Earth. Assuming they could listen to the radio they would probably convert the sound wave patterns to graphic displays of the type we are familiar with. They might discover there were a number of different sources (voices) of the sound waves and possibly even detect certain audio-patterns (words) being repeated at different rates. They might measure the lengths of pauses and breathing rate and all manner of associated and related data. But they would, essentially, have no idea of what was being said – perhaps not even realize that what they were analysing represented an exchange of intelligence and information. Do you get my point?

http://www.gregorysams.com/sun-of-god-book-cover350w.jpg

In Sun of gOd, cultural pioneer and philosopher Gregory Sams brings our solar benefactor in from the cold. Breaking through the barrier initially imposed by a jealous Church, he looks at our Universe in the light of a conscious Sun. The implications are startling, and in harmony with science, logic and common sense. They smoothly join the microcosm to the macrocosm, revealing a Universe incorporating both intelligence and design, with no need for an Intelligent Designer.

For those who would, from a list of religions, tick the “spiritual but not religious” box, Sun of gOd provides easy-to-digest and thought-provoking insights into what it’s all about.

"Sun of gOd presents a perfectly outrageous hypothesis: The sun is a conscious, living organism residing in a thriving galactic community, thinking stellar thoughts that span the entire universe. Surely this is nonsense. Except that the more you read the more a conscious universe begins to make sense. Gregory Sams' book is a clearly written and persuasively reasoned argument to think about the sun in a radically new and refreshing way." -Dean Radin, PhD, Senior Scientist, Institute of Noetic Sciences

"Modern science has confirmed a belief held by many ancient cultures: solar activity is closely linked with human behavior. Moreover, Gregory Sams asserts that the Sun is endowed with intelligence and consciousness. In the brilliantly articulated chapters of this remarkable book, he also provides a provocative paradigm for understanding the self-organizing capacities of the entire Universe." -Stanley Krippner, Ph.D., Co-editor, "Varieties of Anomalous Experience"Sun of gOd: Discover the Self-Organizing Consciousness That Underlies Everything (http://www.amazon.com/Sun-gOd-Self-Organizing-Consciousness-Everything/dp/1578634547)

fbs_brazil

15th October 2015, 18:35

This study from the researcher Tabetha Boyajian published a month ago suggest the strange light pattern is due to "the passage of a family of exocomet fragments", but claims the "necessity of future observations to help interpret the system".

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf

Sunny-side-up

15th October 2015, 22:36

We haven't the techno to see planets around distant stars but we can see structures around that star?

Tyy1907

15th October 2015, 22:53

This story was put on the Chive and now it won't even show up once you go to it. IPad or android it won't even display. Hmmmmm......

Meggings

15th October 2015, 23:27

We haven't the techno to see planets around distant stars but we can see structures around that star?

This is a quote from the website linked to in post 1 above:
"The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.
This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself."

A comment on what Sunny-Side-Up mentions above, that we do not have the "techno" to see planets...I wish to state that in many of the travels my consciousness has made through the 'black ethers' I have seen the most amazing structures that are obviously of technological origin that are hanging out in the most brilliant light imaginable. In the finer travelling body I was in, I had to metaphorically "squint" in order to see them. I flew around them to observe these megastructures, and was quite amazed that such things exist.

Indeed, I have often been mildly surprised at what is out there. However, things seen and experienced do not come with "instruction manuals" and the observer is left with only one's perceptions of the experience. There are truly "more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of" in our philosophy and science.

Bill Ryan

16th October 2015, 00:10

We haven't the techno to see planets around distant stars but we can see structures around that star?

No.... they're analyzing the pattern of interruption of light from the star (like silhouetted planets moving in front of it), and it doesn't fit anything natural. Here's the very interesting article:

http://independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/forget-water-on-mars-astronomers-may-have-just-found-giant-alien-megastructures-orbiting-a-star-near-a6693886.html)

(Note: The Independent is a high quality London newspaper... rather like the Washington Post in the US. This is not the Weekly World News. :) )

Astronomers may have found giant alien 'megastructures' orbiting star near the Milky Way

A large cluster of objects in space look like something you would "expect an alien civilization to build", astronomers have said.

Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish a report on the “bizarre” star system suggesting the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”, according to a new report.

"I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright told The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/). "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build."
(http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/giant-alien-megastructure-found-in-space-what-is-dyson-sphere-and-what-else-could-we-have-found-a6695556.html)
The snappily named KIC 8462852 star lies just above the Milky Way between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified it as a candidate for having orbiting Earth-like planets.

But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.

Kepler works by analysing light from distant places in the universe — looking for changes that take place when planets move in front of their stars. But the dip in starlight from KIC 8462852 doesn't seem to be the normal pattern for a planet.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale told The Atlantic: “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.”

In 2011 the star was flagged up again by several members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analysing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching.

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.

This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.

Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters project, recently published a paper (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1509.03622v1.pdf) looking at all the possible natural explanations for the objects and found all of them wanting except one – that another star had pulled a string of comets close to KIC 8462852. But even this would involve an incredibly improbable coincidence.

That’s when Wright, the astronomer from Penn State University and his colleague Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) got involved. Now the possibility that the objects were created by intelligent creatures is being taken very seriously by the team.

As civilisations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star. If the speculation about a megastructure being placed around the star system is correct, it could for instance be a huge set of solar panels placed around the star, scientists say.

The three astronomers want to point a radio dish at the star to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilisations. And the first observations could be ready to take place as early as January, with follow-up observations potentially coming even quicker.

“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.”

Sunny-side-up

16th October 2015, 00:50

Well taboos are lifting for such comments as found in that report:

The analysts tagged the star as “interesting “ and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation.
To jump from the above quote to the one below is in it's self a MEGA, MEGA jump, just using the words ' alien civilisation' is amazing to me!

"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build."

I still don't see how they could have enough data to say what they have said?

But I hope they are correct and that they keep reporting their findings!

Maybe the Far-Sight team should view it as-well!

Bill Ryan

16th October 2015, 14:49

.
It's now on CNN.

(Bill's note: This is starting to show one or two signs of maybe being carefully orchestrated. All very scientific and respectable, a long way off from Planet Earth, but making the idea of ET civilizations okay to discuss.)

http://edition.cnn.com/2015/10/15/world/extraterrestrial-intelligence-anomaly/index.html

Space anomaly gets extraterrestrial intelligence experts' attention

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute (http://www.seti.org/) has its eyes -- and soon possibly one of the United States' premier telescopes -- focused on an anomaly that some astronomers can't quite explain.

Users on the online astronomy crowdsourcing interface, Planet Hunters (http://www.planethunters.org/), discovered a peculiar light pattern between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations a few years ago. The group uses publicly available data gathered by NASA's Kepler Telescope, which has been tasked with finding Earth-like planets by searching for the periodic dimming of stars that might suggest such a planet is passing by.

After a number of users noticed the peculiarity, it was sent to the group's advisory science team that includes Yale postdoctoral astronomy fellow Tabetha Boyajian (http://www.astro.yale.edu/tabetha/Site/Welcome.html).

"It did definitely spark some lively discussions on the talk boards. We scrolled through the discussion boards and superusers, and they let us know that there's something we should be watching out for," Boyajian says.

"What was unusual about that was the depth of the light dips, up to 20% decrease in light, and the timescales (of light variation) -- a week to a couple of months."

So what's the explanation? Could it be from a swarm of comets? Some sort of intergalactic phenomenon that Earthbound scientists haven't discovered yet? Or an effect of planet-sized structures built by some sort of alien civilization?

Jason Wright, a Penn State astronomy professor, saw Boyajian's data and can't quite explain it. But in a post Thursday to his website (http://sites.psu.edu/astrowright/), he cautioned against jumping to conclusions -- as some apparently have -- that intelligent beings far away are behind this oddity.

"My philosophy of SETI," Wright wrote, referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, "is that you should reserve your alien hypothesis as a last resort." He also cited "Cochran's Commandment to planet hunters ... : Thou shalt not embarrass thyself and they colleagues by claiming false planets."

"It would be such a big deal if true, it's important that you be absolutely sure before claiming you've detected something, lest everybody lose credibility," the astronomer added. "Much more so for SETI."

Comet swarm or sign of alien intelligence?

The star, identified by researchers as KIC 8462852 -- though Wright calls it "Tabby's star" and his team labels it the "WTF star," after the subtitle to Boyajian's paper, "Where's the flux?" -- is roughly 1,465 light-years from Earth, or about 8.6 quadrillion miles.

Along with a group of colleagues, Boyajian published an academic paper last month about the star and concluded the light peculiarities could have been the result of comet fragments.

This is "a plausible but contrived natural explanation," according to Wright.

"I would put low odds on that being the right answer," the Penn State astronomer said. "But it's by far the best one I've seen so far (and much more likely than aliens, I'd say)."

Boyajian herself stressed "the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system," which is why she and her cohorts took the paper to Andrew Siemion (https://seti.berkeley.edu/siemion), the head of the University of California-Berkeley's SETI Group. They wanted answers, and they said top-notch telescopes were needed to get them.

"At first I thought they were absolutely nuts -- it wasn't until they told me their data had been vetted by the Kepler team at NASA," Siemion said.

The California-based astronomer, who's been working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for about 10 years, called the findings "very atypical."

"This is one of maybe only two or three times we've been contacted by an astronomer who says there's something we don't understand," he said. "It is a very strange object."
The search for ET has been going on for years. What do we know? (http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/22/world/extraterrestrial-search-what-we-know/index.html)

Request put in to use radio telescope

Siemion submitted a series of proposals to use telescopes -- including the Green Bank Telescope (https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt/) in West Virginia, which the National Radio Astronomy Observatory calls the premier single-dish radio telescope -- to look deeper into the anomaly.

The Green Bank telescope would be a good fit, given that SETI involves the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using, of all things, radio waves. According to Siemion, "There are particular types of radio waves that as far as we know can only be produced by technology."

"The advantage is that it's very easy to distinguish," he said. "Lots of the galaxies produces radio waves. If we see lots of energy in an area, it's an unmistakable marker of technology."

The SETI Institute, which is based in Northern California, expects to hear the results of its request within the next month or two.

"We're going to look very closely, as closely as we can. We are limited in terms of how long we can view a target given the curvature of the earth (and) instrumentation," Siemion said. "If we're awarded the observation, we'll have between 24 to 36 hours with a variety of different radio receivers."

While those involved in this effort are hesitant to jump to conclusions about what exactly is going on, they do think it's worth digging into it.

According to Yale's Boyajian, "Information will allow us to confirm something or rule something out. We're excited to learn all about this system -- we want to figure it out."

Shadowself

16th October 2015, 17:32

Oh mama! I feel a preamble coming on...:star:

Let's see now...that would be four for four if I'm right....:highfive:

MalteseKnight

16th October 2015, 17:38

Culmination of the Interstellar movie = Cygnus= Doris Lessing = From Wikipedia...The Canopus in Argos novels present an advanced interstellar society's efforts to accelerate the evolution of other worlds, including Earth. Using Sufi concepts, to which Lessing had been introduced in the mid-1960s by her "good friend and teacher" Idries Shah, the series of novels also utilizes an approach similar to that employed by the early 20th century mystic G. I. Gurdjieff in his work All and Everything. Hmmmm.....................................predictive programming anyone?

From Wikipedia : Cygnus /ˈsɪɡnəs/ is a northern constellation lying on the plane of the Milky Way, deriving its name from the Latinized Greek word for swan. The swan is one of the most recognizable constellations of the northern summer and autumn, it features a prominent asterism known as the Northern Cross (in contrast to the Southern Cross). Cygnus was among the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd century astronomer Ptolemy, and it remains one of the 88 modern constellations.

Cygnus contains Deneb, one of the brightest stars in the night sky and one corner of the Summer Triangle, as well as some notable X-ray sources and the giant stellar association of Cygnus OB2. One of the stars of this association, NML Cygni, is one of the largest stars currently known. The constellation is also home to Cygnus X-1, a distant X-ray binary containing a supergiant and unseen massive companion that was the first object widely held to be a black hole. Many star systems in Cygnus have known planets as a result of the Kepler Mission observing one patch of the sky, the patch is the area around Cygnus. In addition, most of the eastern part of Cygnus is dominated by the Hercules–Corona Borealis Great Wall, a giant galaxy filament that is the largest known structure in the observable universe; covering most of the northern sky.

simon155

23rd October 2015, 09:18

I have a suspicion most people would like this to be the case - it's far more interesting than the quite frankly mundane. That said, the mundane is mundane because it is far more likely and far more common.

In this case, the expectation is that any number of comets of other natural causes could cause the same effect. A megalith was proposed as a possibility. That does not imply it is a likely explanation however.

The idea of megaliths will most likely reduce in popularity given sufficient time - they usually pop up during a period of technological stagnation, where it is anticipated that significant increases in energy require significant upscaling in size. Following a technological advancement, such as those you'll most likely hear about in the next few years, that notion will most likely be replaced. In terms of expansion, as a rule, efficiency always wins. If there is a more efficient means of doing something, that requires less resources and work, it tends to make more sense. If you are an interstellar species, you will most likely be inclined to terraform / colonize rather than construct on a larger scale. Obviously there are some exceptions - dependant on the design and purpose of the construction, and if mass is a significant factor.

Clear Light

23rd October 2015, 13:13

Clear Light

25th November 2015, 15:24

UPDATE : Astronomers say comet fragments best explanation of mysterious dimming star (http://phys.org/news/2015-11-astronomers-comet-fragments-explanation-mysterious.html) (25 Nov 2015)

Was it a catastrophic collision in the star's asteroid belt? A giant impact that disrupted a nearby planet? A dusty cloud of rock and debris? A family of comets breaking apart? Or was it alien megastructures built to harvest the star's energy?

Just what caused the mysterious dimming of star KIC 8462852?

[...]

So Marengo and two other astronomers decided to take a close look at the star using data taken with the Infrared Array Camera of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. They report their findings in a paper recently published online by The Astrophysical Journal Letters. [1]

Their conclusion?

"The scenario in which the dimming in the KIC 8462852 light curve were caused by the destruction of a family of comets remains the preferred explanation …," wrote the three – Marengo; Alan Hulsebus, an Iowa State doctoral student; and Sarah Willis, a former Iowa State graduate student now with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Lincoln Laboratory.

Questions about the star were launched last month when a research team led by Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University reported on the star in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The astronomers reported how citizen scientists tagged the star's deep and irregular dips in brightness as "bizarre" and "interesting."

Boyajian and the other researchers looked at the data and investigated several possible causes. They wrote the "most promising theory" was a barrage of crumbling comets passing in front of the star.

In a subsequent paper submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, Jason Wright and colleagues at Penn State University speculated about other causes, including alien megastructures built to harvest energy while orbiting the star.

When the Iowa State astronomers studied the star with Spitzer infrared data from January 2015 – two years after the Kepler measurements – Marengo said they didn't see much. If there had been some kind of catastrophe near the star, he said there would be a lot of dust and debris. And that would show up as extra infrared emissions.

Marengo said the study looked at two different infrared wavelengths: the shorter was consistent with a typical star and the longer showed some infrared emissions, but not enough to reach a detection threshold. The astronomers concluded there were no excess infrared emissions and therefore no sign of an asteroid belt collision, a giant impact on a planet or a dusty cloud of rock and debris.

So Marengo and his colleagues say the destruction of a family of comets near the star is the most likely explanation for the mysterious dimming. The comet fragments coming in rapidly at a steep, elliptical orbit could create a big debris cloud that could dim the star. Then the cloud would move off, restoring the star's brightness and leaving no trace of excess infrared light.

And the alien megastructure theory?

"We didn't look for that," Marengo said. "We can't really say it is, or is not. But what the star is doing is very strange. It's interesting when you have phenomena like that – typically it means there's some new physical explanation or a new concept to be discovered."

[1] : KIC 8462852: THE INFRARED FLUX (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/814/1/L15/) (19 Nov)

Clear Light

16th January 2016, 08:39

UPDATE : Weird star system scientists have been checking for aliens just got weirder (http://www.cnet.com/news/the-weird-star-system-scientists-have-been-checking-for-aliens-just-got-weirder/) (January 15, 2016) [1]

There is a star, unimpressively named KIC 8462852, that sits 1,400 light-years away and seems to be relatively similar to our own sun. But whatever circles that star is so weird and unprecedented that respected scientists concede far-fetched explanations like "alien megastructures" cannot be completely ruled out. A new analysis of observations of the star dating back to the 19th century shows that the weirdness around it has been happening for decades, if not centuries, and could rule out the leading natural explanation.

To date, the most likely scenario seemed to be that a swarm of giant comets might be passing in front of the star, but one veteran astronomer now says the star has also been growing consistently dimmer since at least 1890. That's a completely new level of weirdness that's tough to pin on just comets, especially when combined with the more recent strangeness that first brought the star to our attention.

Bradley E. Schaefer, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Louisiana State University, went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to examine Harvard University's archival photographic plates that include about half a million photographs of the sky on glass plates taken between 1890 and 1989. He found that the light observed from KIC 8462852 consistently and significantly faded over the course of almost a complete century of observations.

"The KIC 8462852 light curve from 1890 to 1989 shows a highly significant secular trend in fading over 100 years, with this being completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star," reads a paper by Schaefer that's been submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters and is available in its pre-peer review draft form here (http://arxiv.org/abs/1601.03256). "Such stars should be very stable in brightness, with evolution making for changes only on time scales of many millions of years."

https://d1o50x50snmhul.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/dn28786-1_800.jpg

KIC 8462852 first came to our attention last year, several months after it had first been flagged by volunteer citizen scientists who use the online platform Planet Hunters (http://www.planethunters.org/) to eyeball light curve data for distant stars spotted by the Kepler Space Telescope.

Tabetha Boyajian, a Yale postdoc who is also on the Planet Hunters science team, spearheaded a group that published a paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03622) detailing the oddly significant and irregular dips in light observed from the star, which would fade by as much as 20 percent for as long as a whole day.

Boyajian's paper didn't mention alien megastructures, instead suggesting that something natural, like swarms of large comets, might be passing in front of the star and blocking its light. But she also shared the team's data and analysis with other scientists like Penn State's Jason Wright, an authority on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) and hypothetical alien megastructures like the Dyson Sphere or Dyson Swarm.

The SETI Institute and other scientific organizations trained their telescopes on the star in the months that followed (http://www.cnet.com/news/the-search-for-an-alien-signal-from-that-mysterious-star-is-well-underway/), but so far have failed to find any evidence of alien signals coming from the system.

Researchers at Iowa State University used infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to publish a paper (http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2041-8205/814/1/L15;jsessionid=E749F8369A29C1837D98123509BABCD4.c4.iopscience.cld.iop.org) in November concluding that "the scenario in which the dimming in the KIC 8462852 light curve were caused by the destruction of a family of comets remains the preferred explanation."

But Schaefer's new look at the old observations of KIC 8462852 casts doubt on what has been the leading scientific hypothesis for the system's weirdness since it was first noted.

Let's just break down how odd this is real quick. Kepler, which observed the star over the course of a few recent years in the 21st century, finds that there are some very large objects passing in front of it at irregular intervals. Then Schaefer goes back and looks at the astronomical equivalent of the dusty old microfiche machines in the back of the library and finds that it has also been getting slowly dimmer for about as long as we've been watching it (or at least the area of the sky that it's in), which is the exact opposite of how stars like our sun normally behave.

"This star is really weird; normal main sequence stars slowly increase in luminosity as they age, on time scales of hundreds of millions of years. A star that gets 20 percent dimmer in a century is unprecedented," Massimo Marengo told me. He's one of the Iowa State researchers who backed the comet swarm hypothesis in a paper published in November.

This pokes a hole in the theory that big comets are causing the big dips we're seeing in the star's light.

"With 36 giant comets required to make the one 20 percent Kepler dip, and all of these along one orbit, we would need 648,000 giant-comets to create the century-long fading," Schaefer writes. "I do not see how it is possible for something like 648,000 giant comets to exist around one star, nor to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century. So I take this century-long dimming as a strong argument against the comet-family hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips."

I contacted Boyajian to see what she thought of the newly revisited history of "her" star (KIC 8462852 is informally referred to as "Tabby's Star" in astronomy circles) and she told me she has discussed it with Schaefer and is intrigued by what he found. And more baffled than ever by the phenomenon.

"I think this new analysis is very exciting. It is the second piece of evidence we now have that says what is happening to the star is very unusual (the first being the Kepler light curve). However, it does not help the case for the comet hypothesis, nor point us into any obvious direction to pursue next."

Marengo told me he agrees that the comet swarm seems a less likely explanation for all the dimming, but he thinks a ring around the star of a certain shape and composition might explain all the weirdness.

"Note that eccentric geometrically thin circumstellar rings around stars similar to KIC 8462852 are not unprecedented: Fomalhaut has one."

Throughout my reporting on this bizarre star system, every scientist I've contacted always reiterates that the "alien megastructures" explanation should be a "hypothesis of last resort," and so far there is no actual evidence besides what are basically unexplained shadows to point in that direction. Still, it's hard not to let the imagination run wild, or at least take a brisk jog around the block. Do the photographic plates from Harvard show a centuries-long construction project on a scale beyond human capability happening around a distant star?

http://cnet3.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2016/01/15/c957c712-70d4-49fb-9918-5d700b19ff6a/resize/970x546/307fce8698f20aba0387351c936c9690/fomalhautatc.jpg
An artist's rendering of how Fomalhaut's system might appear [NASA/David A. Hardy/ROE/ATC/NSF]

Probably not, but until we get more evidence of what's really going on, it's not impossible.

"I don't know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis, except that it would *seem* to exclude a lot of natural explanations, including comets," Jason Wright wrote in an email to CNET on Thursday.

Wright notes that "since no one uses photographic plates any more, it's basically a lost art...also, the data are very noisy." But, he adds, "Schaefer is an expert at this stuff, though."

Schaefer does not go so far as to suggest a possible source of all the strange long-term and short-term dimming happening around KIC 8462852. But he does believe, per Occam's Razor -- the idea that the simplest explanation is usually the best -- that both are likely caused by the same thing, whatever that may be.

So one thing is likely causing a star to appear dimmer over time, and also to be partially blocked every now and then by something like a bunch of giant comets, each potentially as large as the size of Connecticut.

In addition to his ring suggestion, Marengo offers one other tongue-in-cheek hypothesis in an email: "Of course we may all be wrong and this could just be the Starkiller base feeding off the poor star..."

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Or [1] New Scientist : Comets can’t explain weird ‘alien megastructure’ star after all (https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28786-comets-cant-explain-weird-alien-megastructure-star-after-all/) (15 January 2016)