‘Alien Megastructure’ Blocking Bizarre Star Discovered, Scientists To Test If It Was Built By Extraterrestrials

A group of scientists are adamant that researchers, baffled by the discovery of a huge object that appears to be blocking a bizarre star, have stumbled upon an “Alien Megastructure” that they think has been built by extraterrestrials.

According to the Daily Mail, the Kepler Space Telescope has been monitoring an area of space known as KIC 946285 for close to 7 years now. It is located around 1,480 light-years away, and the strange fluctuation in the light that it emits has left researchers and scientists completely baffled.

Because of its bizarre light fluctuations, which scientists are at odds to explain, a group of their peers now insist that a huge alien megastructure has been built and is blocking the star.

Speaking to the Atlantic, Tabetha Boyajian, who is a postdoctorate at Yale University, explained, “We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Back in 2011, several citizen scientists, who had been hired by Kepler’s science team to look at the pattern of the stars in the area to see if they could spot any anomalies, said that the star’s light pattern was both “interesting” and “bizarre.”

This star’s pattern suggested that there was a huge amount of matter circling around it in a very tight formation. This is to be expected when a star is young. However, KIC 946285 appears to be rather mature.

Boyajian recently published a paper on the star that looked to outline the possible causes for what made it so unique. However, by its conclusion, it had discounted many of them.

Boyajian, alongside a number of co-authors, wrote in her work, “In this paper, we describe various scenarios to explain the mysterious events in the Kepler light curve, most of which have problems explaining the data in hand.”

It continues, “By considering the observational constraints on dust clumps orbiting a normal main-sequence star, we conclude that the scenario most consistent with the data in hand is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments, all of which are associated with a single previous breakup event.”

With Boyajian at a loss for why the star is so eccentric, Jason Wright, who is an astronomer over at Penn State University, looked at the data and then formed his own opinion, which revolves around extraterrestrials.

Wright, alongside his own group of co-authors, are set to publish a paper that hypothesizes that the “alien megastructure” causing this strange light pattern was built by an alien civilization. Wright believes that it’s been designed to catch energy from the star.

Speaking to the Atlantic, Wright explained, “When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked. Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

About his research, Wright remarked, “The idea behind our research is that, if an entire galaxy had been colonized by an advanced spacefaring civilization, the energy produced by that civilization’s technologies would be detectable in mid-infrared wavelengths.”

Working alongside Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, Boyajian and Wright now want to take their plan to the next stage to try and find out what is actually going on with the star.

They want to point a huge radio dish at the star, and then wait and see if it “emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.” If that proves to be true, they will then work with Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to figure out if these waves were “emitted by a technological source.”

The current plan of action will begin in January, with a follow-up expected in Fall, 2016.

[Images: NASA via Getty Images & Shutterstock / Triff & Photo by NASA, ESA, and the Hubble SM4 ERO Team via Getty Images]