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An artists depiction of the Kepler space telescope(Photo: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech, EPA)
Strange light emitting from a distant star has astronomers and people in the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>scientific<span style="color: Red;">*</span>community<span style="color: Red;">*</span>scratching their heads.
Is a megastructure created by an alien civilization diverting the light to create energy? Or is it just leftover particles from an asteroid belt? Maybe, a technical glitch?
The only sure thing about the star, called KIC 8462852, seems to be uncertainty.
Spotted by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope in 2009, the strange light pattern emitted from the star has puzzled many over the<span style="color: Red;">*</span>years.
"We'd never seen anything like this star," Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale specializing in astronomy, told The Atlantic. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."
Kepler hunts for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy<span style="color: Red;">*</span>and since launching in 2009 has found over a thousand planets. The planet-hunting telescope monitors the brightness of stars and looks for tiny dips in light patterns that could signify an orbiting planet.
But while there is a consistent pattern for many stars, the light pattern emitting from KIC 8462852 doesn't follow the normal model.
In 2011, the star was flagged as "interesting," by members of Planet Hunters, a group that relies on citizen scientists to analyze Kepler data, The Atlantic reported.
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The pattern of light suggests a large mass of matter is circling the star. That would be normal for a young star that might be surrounded by dust and particles<span style="color: Red;">*</span>but not for an older star like KIC 8462852.
Boyajian, who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper in collaboration with other astronomers and citizen scientists<span style="color: Red;">*</span>on the "various scenarios" that could cause the "mysterious events in the Kepler light curve."
"We presented an extensive set of scenarios to explain the occurrence of the dips, most of which are unsuccessful in explaining the observations in their entirety," the researchers conclude in article<span style="color: Red;">*</span>published in<span style="color: Red;">*</span>in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
The most "compelling"<span style="color: Red;">*</span>scenario was that another star passed through the strange star's system, causing a clump of comets, which could have caused the strange light pattern.
But, the scientists note that the majority of their scenarios "have problems explaining the data in hand," and the exo-comet scenario isn't infallible.
Enter the alien theory.
While Boyajian's report focuses on the potential natural causes for the light pattern, some astronomers are questioning whether the answer to the pattern may lie not in science<span style="color: Red;">*</span>but in extraterrestrial life.
The light pattern is consistent with a "swarm of megastructures," possibly created to capture energy from the star, according to Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, The Atlantic reported.
"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build," Wright told the organization.
Boyajian teamed up with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of SETI (The<span style="color: Red;">*</span>Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence),<span style="color: Red;">*</span>at the University of California, Berkeley, to take that idea a step further, The Atlantic reported.
The trio are writing a proposal that if granted<span style="color: Red;">*</span>would allow the group to point a massive radio dish at the star and see if it emits wavelengths consistent with coming from a technological source, according to The Atlantic.
The quest to uncover the star's mystery comes months after<span style="color: Red;">*</span>SETI<span style="color: Red;">*</span>received a large injection<span style="color: Red;">*</span>from a Russian internet billionaire, Yuri Milner,Popular Mechanics reports.<span style="color: Red;">*</span>The funds will beef up radio telescopes in West Virginia and Australia that have been quietly listening for radio signals from outer space for a half-century in hopes of finding intelligent life.
If everything goes according to plan, the scientists are hoping the first observation will take place in January, The Atlantic reported.
Contributing: Doug Stanglin<span style="color: Red;">*</span>
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