ASTRONOMERS BELIEVE THAT a series of objects sighted in deep space bear all the hallmarks of alien construction.
A star, which sits above the milky way in the sky and is invisible to the human eye, was stared at for more than four years by the Kepler Space Telescope up until 2014, and now scientists think that objects surrounding the star could be a ”swarm of megastructures”.
The Kepler telescope is manned by a team of citizen scientists, known as the ‘Planet Hunters’, who sift through the data on the 150,000 stars that the telescope monitors.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral student at Yale University who oversees the team, told The Atlantic.
It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.
Now astronomer and Planet Hunter Jason Wright is set to publish a paper on what the objects could represent.
Specifically, the possibility that the objects surrounding the star (catchily named KIC 8462852), could have been created by intelligent alien life is now being taken very seriously by the team.
The theory is that the structures could be a series of huge solar panels, with whatever civilisation is responsible aiming to harness the power of their own sun.
Next up for the Planet Hunters is a project to point a radio dish at the star to look for evidence of radio waves that could be associated with a technologically-advanced civilisation. They’re hoping to do this in January.
“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.
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