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The most mysterious star in the Milky Way is at it again. Astronomers are sounding the alarms Friday as telescope observations detect unusual light patterns coming from a distant star

By Marina Koren The Atlantic 5-19-17

located about 1,300 light-years away from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus, in the outer edges of the galaxy. The mysterious dimming and flickering of the star, first discovered in 2011, means something is passing in front of it. It has puzzled astronomers ever since, but this is the first time they’ve seen it dimming in real time, presenting an extraordinary opportunity to observe whatever it is that’s blocking the star’s light.
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A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an "alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers. Over the past year, scientists have hypothesized that everything from a mass of comets to bad data or alien structures could be to blame for the unusual light curve. (Illustration)

A mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an "alien megastructure,” continues to confound researchers. A study accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal has only

By Mary Bowerman USA Today 10-5-16

“deepened the mystery” surrounding the strange light pattern emitted from the star known as KIC 8462852.

...the strange dimming of KIC 8462852 suggests a large mass of matter is circling KIC 8462852. Over the past year, scientists have hypothesized that everything from a mass of comets to bad data or alien structures could be to blame for the unusual light curve. So far, nothing has been conclusive and attempts to identify radio signals from the star have been unfruitful. ...
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This diagram shows the transit zone our planet will sweep through when it passes in front of the sun; any intelligent extraterrestrials looking at our sun living in a star system that falls within this zone will detect us.

What if an advanced alien civilization saw our planet across the interstellar expanse and switched on their powerful radio transmitters to send a “hello neighbor!” message... but all of our radio antennae were staring at KIC 8462852 when we really should be paying attention to Omicron Persei.

Ian O'Neill news.discovery.com 3-1-16

Space is big and there’s billions of stars in our galaxy where hypothetical transmitting extraterrestrials could be orbiting; we may be missing out on a flood of alien phone calls every day just because we can’t monitor them all.


Enter René Heller and Ralph Pudritz of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Göttingen, Germany, and McMaster University in Canada, respectively, who pondered this very question and arrived at a wonderfully elegant solution. Granted, their strategy, which has been published in the journal Astrobiology, doesn’t tell us exactly where intelligent aliens are holed up, but it may better the odds of us tapping into the galactic switchboard. [...]
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The hunt for extraterrestrial life — of any kind, including lowly, long-dead microbes — is lofty enough. But the hunt for intelligent civilizations that could be looking for us in return? It's even more of a long shot. In a new paper published in the journal Astrobiology, researchers present one possible strategy for finding these theoretical beings: Assume that they're searching for us in exactly the same way we're searching for them.

Rachel Feltman The Washington Post 3-1-16

[...]

"It's impossible to predict whether extraterrestrials use the same observational techniques as we do," study co-author René Heller of the Institute for Astrophysics in Göttingen, Germany, said in a statement. "But they will have to deal with the same physical principles as we do, and Earth's solar transits are an obvious method to detect us."

In theory, we may be able to catch a planet that had already sent us some kind of message long, long ago. And once we knew what direction to listen in, we'd stand a better chance of capturing it. [...]
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The faraway star KIC 8462852 has been a fervent topic of debate over the last few months, ever since folks at SETI proposed that maybe—just maybe—a there was a giant alien megastructure around the star responsible for the weird readings scientists had been getting. Since then, most people have come to accept the more ordinary explanation that comets are responsible for the space oddity. But it turns out the NASA's next great observatory, the James Webb Space Telescope, could be just the thing to answer this kind of question for sure.

By John Wenz www.popularmechanics.com 2-9-16

The hubbub all started last October when NASA's Kepler planet-hunting telescope found a strange phenomenon around a sun-like star. Something was blocking out 20 percent of the light from KIC 8462852, since nicknamed "Tabby's Star" after discoverer Tabetha S. Boyajian. A planet even the size of Jupiter or larger should have blocked out only 1 percent of the light. That suggests something big is here, and no Earth-based telescopes detected heat coming from whatever was blocking the light, meaning it wasn't a planet or an asteroid.

The lead hypothesis has been, and remains, that comets are blocking out the light. A swarm of them may have collided and created a giant cloud of icy-cold debris. But even that doesn't quite tell the whole story. For one thing, astronomers still can't explain how there would be a cloud of comets big enough to block out that much light from a mid-sized star. It would require more mass than is found in our solar system's entire Kuiper Belt, the region of objects that includes Pluto, an unlikely scenario.

That's where the megastructures came in [...]
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      The weirdest star in the cosmos just got a lot weirder. And yes, it might be aliens.

Known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star, it has been baffling astronomers for the past few months after a team of researchers noticed its light seemed to be dipping in brightness in bizarre ways. Proposed explanations ranged from a cloud of comets to orbiting “alien megastructures”.

Now an analysis of historical observations reveals the star has been gradually dimming for over a century, leaving everyone scratching their heads as to the cause.


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. [...]
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      The SETI Institute is following up on the possibility that the stellar system KIC 8462852 might be home to an advanced civilization.

This star, slightly brighter than the Sun and more than 1400 light-years away, has been the subject of scrutiny by NASA’s Kepler space telescope. It has shown some surprising behavior that’s odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena. KIC 8462852 occasionally dims by as much as 20 percent, suggesting that there is some material in orbit around this star that blocks its light.

For various reasons, it’s obvious that this material is not simply a planet. A favored suggestion is that it is debris from comets that have been drawn into relatively close orbit to the star.

But another, and obviously intriguing, possibility is that this star is home to a technologically sophisticated society that has constructed a phalanx of orbiting solar panels (a so-called Dyson swarm) that block light from the star.

To investigate this idea, we have been using the Allen Telescope Array to search for non-natural radio signals from the direction of KIC 8462852. This effort is looking for both narrow-band signals (similar to traditional SETI experiments) as well as somewhat broader transmissions that might be produced, for example, by powerful spacecraft. [...]
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     It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data," said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. "We were scratching our heads. For any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it."

She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn't sure what.

[...]

To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. If none of the ordinary reasons for the star's flux quite seemed to fit, perhaps an extraordinary one was in order.

Aliens.

Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens - a "swarm of megastructures," as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star.

"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright said. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build." [...]
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Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.

      [...]

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

[...]

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

Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity. [...]
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      A distant star is getting a lot of attention from astronomers – possibly as a sign that alien life is out there.

The star KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program at Yale University. Taking data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers go searching for signs of a drop in light due to orbiting exoplanets crossing in front of their parent stars.

KIC 8462852 is 1,481 light years away from Earth. A light year measures the astronomical distance that light travels in one year and is equivalent to 5.8 trillion miles. Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who wrote a paper on the star that appeared in the Monthly Notes of the Royals Astronomical Society, told the New Scientist that she was drawn to the star’s flickering behavior.

She then sent her data to Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright, who has done research on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. He was impressed.

“That was when I got interested in in it because the light curve is so bizarre,” Wright told FoxNews.com. “It gets dimmer for days at a time. We haven’t seen anything quite like this.” [...]
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