Alien Megastructure In Space Theory Reignited

The first signs of this space oddity came from NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which continually watched the star’s region of the sky between 2009 and 2013. Most planet-hosting stars show small, regular dips in light when their planets pass in front of them. But Tabby’s star dipped erratically throughout the four years, sometimes losing as much as 20 per cent of its brightness.

In September 2015, a team led by Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University, who lends the star its informal name, tried to make sense of this unusual signal. Ultimately they determined that dust from a large cloud of comets was the best explanation.

A month later, the star made headlines across the globe thanks to a paper by Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University and his colleagues, who suggested that “alien megastructures”, such as satellites designed to collect light from the star, could be responsible for the signal.

Dyson Sphere

While the prospect of aliens was first launched by Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, almost everyone in the astronomy community agreed that the chances that this was the case were "very low." Now, the latest investigations into this strange star by Louisiana State University astronomer Bradley Schaefer have reignited the alien theory, New Scientist reported.

Now Bradley Schaefer of Louisiana State University has discovered that the mystery goes even further. When Boyajian’s team studied the star, they looked at data from a Harvard University archive of digitally scanned photographic plates of the sky from the past century or so to see if the star had behaved unusually in the past, but found nothing.

Schaefer decided this unusual star deserved a second look. He averaged the data in five-year bins to look for slow, long-term trends, and found that the star faded by about 20 per cent between 1890 and 1989. “The basic effect is small and not obvious,” he says.

To confirm the fade was real, Schaefer went to Harvard to look at the original photographic plates and inspected them by eye for changes, a skill few astronomers possess these days. “Since no one uses photographic plates any more, it’s basically a lost art,” says Wright. “Schaefer is an expert at this stuff.” 

Schaefer saw the same century-long dimming in his manual readings, and calculated that it would require 648,000 comets, each 200 kilometres wide, to have passed by the star – completely implausible, he says.

Reignited Dyson sphere

New Study: Aliens building a mega-structure around Tabby’s Star?

Tabby's star shows evidence that there is an alien civilization building a Dyson Sphere around it? KIC8462852 also known as Tabby star has recently become the primary subject of much ongoing research. The strange fluctuations in this star’s light are what caused Yale astronomer Tabetha (Tabby) Boyajian, who first discovered the star to describe it as the most mysterious star in the universe.

Tabby's Star Dyson Sphere

Astronomer Bradley E. Schaefer from Louisiana State University's findings had suggested a long-term dimming of the Tabby star. A brightness decrease by 20 percent over the last century and that is highly difficult to explain by natural means. But it is consistent with the idea that aliens were gradually converting the material in the star’s planetary system into giant mega structures.

Schaefer’s study has now been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed Astrophysical Journal. Schaefer said that independent measures by astronomers show that Tabby’s star has indeed faded. The dips found by Kepler are real. Something seems to be transiting in front of this star, and we still have no idea what it is! Schaefer took a hard look at this mysterious star not only using the Kepler telescope data, but using a collection of roughly 500,000 sky photographs in the archives of Harvard College Observatory.

Two independent sources now show Tabby Star is displaying unique and inexplicable photometric variations. These findings have scientists scratching their head. Of course none have wanted to say that it is solid evidence of intelligent aliens. Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University has stated "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider. But this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” We need to consider that perhaps we’ve caught an advanced alien civilization in the process of building something massive near KIC8462852. Could this be some sort of Dyson Sphere type megastructure built by a highly advanced civilization? How likely is it for 648,000 giant-comets to exist around one star? And to have their orbits orchestrated so as to all pass in front of the star within the last century?

This century-long dimming is a strong argument against the comet hypothesis to explain the Kepler dips. It has been going on for as long as we’ve had telescopes to point at the sky. The comets would have to be the size of a separate solar system to explain it and that is completely implausible, Dr. Schaefer says. As observed by the Kepler spacecraft, everyone agrees that Tabby Star's light can appear strongly and weirdly irregular. Anywhere from a fraction-of- a-percent to around 20 percent of the star’s light sometimes is apparently blocked. That’s why astronomers began talking about alien megastructures, the Dyson spheres.

These vast structures are the best explanation for what might be periodically blocking the star’s light. To investigate this idea, scientists have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-naturalm radio signals from the direction of the mystery star. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft. The world’s top astronomers of the SETI program have refused to rule out the possibility of an extraterrestrial mega structure orbiting the Tabby star. They have stated that they were unable to disapprove the theory that a massive artificial structure is causing the mysterious light patterns spotted around the distant star.