Astronomers spot potential ‘alien megastructures’ around distant star

The search for alien life around the world has been ongoing for much of the past century, with various individuals and organisations pointing listening devices to the sky in the hopes of hearing a message from another people on another world. We also look for them too, with high powered telescopes and imaging systems aimed at far flung stars. One of these stars has some strange clusters of matter in its orbit, that don't appear planet-like. One suggestion has been that they could be ‘alien megastructures.”

The star in question is KIC 8462852, an F-type main-sequence star located some 1,481 light years from Earth. While the star itself is quite typical, what orbits it isn't. While the Kepler telescope's imaging in 2009 suggested it could have a habitable planet orbiting it, further research by Penn State University showed up a bizarre light pattern around the star; not one usually associated with a passing planet.

Many researchers from there and elsewhere consider the star an anomolay, because of what appears to be a cluster of matter orbiting it. Certain typical suggestions like the kind of debris seen after the formation of a young star or a number of comets trailing a planet – but the star isn't young enough for the former, and the latter would be very, very unlikely.

As long as we don't do anything that releases the Flood, it's cool

Of course an alien civilisation's space-station constructions would be even less likely, but it's a possibility that Penn State researcher Jason Wright is considering.

“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright said to 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.”

He's recently teamed up with SETI and together they plan to point a radio dish at the star to see if they can pick up any potential transmissions emitting from the system. Results from any such experiments are expected to be in by as soon as January, so we may soon have our answer.

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KitGuru Says: Even if the matter cluster is a form of alien structure, the chances of it being dead and long deserted are much higher than it being active. 

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