NASA's Kepler Telescope has stumbled upon one
of the most fascinating discoveries so far – a colossal artificial
megastructure believed to have been constructed by an advanced alien
civilization.
Besides Kepler’s ability of finding small,
rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, it can also detect different space
phenomenon like stellar flares, star spots and dusty planetary rings.
This time however, Kepler detected the signal
of a supposed vast artificial structure orbiting a star only 1,500 light years
away from Earth.
After finishing all plausible explanations,
scientists now believe that this complex structure might be an artificial
construction made by an advanced alien civilization way up on the Kardashev
scale of comparison.
This megastructure works like a supersized
solar array orbiting around its host star, stocking the energy and sending it
back to the source. The size of the structure is so grand that it’s blocking a
considerable fraction of starlight as it spins around its host.
Normally all the exoplanets discovered by
Kepler have a typical planet-shape, meaning they are round. This time however,
the telescope detected something that isn’t round and behaves unnatural.
A paper has been submitted to the journal
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in which a particular star
named KIC 8462852 is described.
“Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC
8462852 was observed to undergo irregulary shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down
to below the twenty percent level. 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.” – Tabetha Boyajian, researcher at Yale
University
Studies mostly focused on two interesting
anomalies at KIC 8462852, one that was recorded between days 788 and 795 of the
Kepler mission and between days 1510 to 1570.
The first event showed a single transit
causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent, while the second event
manifested as a burst of several transits, possibly indicating towards mass of
different objects, resulting in a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. For such
a major dip in brightness to occure, the transiting objects have to be
extremely big.
Considering that our galaxy has existed for
more than 13 billion years, it’s not hard to imagine that an alien civilization
may be out there, possessing technology that allows them to build
megastructures around stars.
“Aliens should always be the very last
hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an
alien civilization to build.” – Jason Wright, astronomer from Penn State
University told the Atlantic.
After analyzing all possible situations,
scientists concluded that this strange anomaly might be the result of a group
of dormant comets recently disturbed by a nearby star. Because this theory is
not all that convincing, other researchers are already hypothesizing the
possibility of a mega-engineered project created by a Type 2 alien civilization
on the Kardashev scale.
This type of aliens would have the ability to
use all the available energy radiating from a star. With the help of a vast
shell or series of rings surrounding a star, a Dyson sphere-like structure
could be constructed. This would block out the star from sight in visible
wavelengths, but once the solar energy has been utilized by the alien civilization,
the energy would be shifted to longer wavelengths and probably lost as infrared
radiation.
Puzzled by these strange recordings,
scientists are now trying to point a radio antenna at KIC 8462852 in order to
solve the riddle. By doing so, they will be able to detect any artificial radio
signals coming from the star and will determine whether or not an intelligent,
Type 2 civilization exists in our vicinity, only 1,500 light-years away.
Meanwhile, a second paper is being drafted by top researchers in order
to analyze the transit scenario focusing around the possibility of a colossal
artificial device engineered by advanced aliens.
