Kepler discovers alien life?

NASA's Kepler Space Telescope's duty is to find small, rocky worlds orbiting distant stars. It can also detect stellar flares, star spots and dusty planetary rings.

The star KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program at Yale University. They volunteer to search for signs of a drop in light due to orbiting exoplanets crossing in front of their parent stars.

When Kepler detects an exoplanet, it does so by sensing the very slight dip in starlight from a given star. Exoplanet orbits in front of star, Kepler detects a slight dimming of starlight and creates a "lightcurve" or basically a graph charting the dip in starlight over time. Much information can be taken from the lightcurve, such as the physical size and shape of the exoplanet.

Jason Wright, an astronomer at Penn State University said that KIC 8462852 gets dimmer for days at a time and they haven't seen anything quite like it.

In a paper submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers, including citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program, report: "Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20 percent level."

"This seems to be old. It doesn't show any signs of youth. It is nowhere near a place that stars form," Wright said. "It's moving too quickly to be a young star. It doesn't look young," he said. "So, that gets rid of all the natural, obvious things. Then, you start reaching for contrived ways to do this to an old star."

"We'd never seen anything like this star," Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctorate researcher at Yale University and lead author said. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."

"We just happened to be looking when a giant swarm of enormous comets is passing by," Wright said. "Maybe. Something weird is going. This may be the best explanation I've heard so far."

"Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build," He added. "If alien civilizations do build giant structures, planet-sized structures in space, sometimes they will pass in front of their star and it will look different from when a planet transits the star. If Kepler surveyed 100,000 stars and one of those is surrounded by alien megastructures, Kepler will notice them. They won't look like a planet. They will look very different."

KIC 8462852 can be classified as a Type II civilization or the star has the ability to utilize all the available energy radiating.

Boyajian is now teaming up to write a proposal with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California Berkeley. They would like to direct a huge radio dish at the star to see if it emits radio waves of the "sort that could only be emitted by artificial technology."