NASA's Kepler Space Telescope that is meant to study objects orbiting thousands of stars has found out something interesting in a star located between Cygnus and Lyra constellations, making experts raise hypothesis of a possible advanced alien civilisation in another planet.
The Kepler Space Telescope has found that the particular star, which is not visible to the naked eyes, emit a light pattern very different from the ones sent out by other stars. Dips in the light emitted by a star suggest that a big mass could be revolving around it.
"We'd never seen anything like this star," said Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, to The Atlantic (via Discovery News). "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."
According to The Atlantic, Kepler's astronomers set up a programme called Planet Hunters to allow citizen scientists study light patterns of the stars in the comfort of their homes considering the huge collections of light.
Experts, who joined the programme, found something interesting about the aforementioned star that appears to be mature, which means there is very less possibility of dust in the space that can cause an excess of infrared light. But a substantial number of photons have been blocked from the Kepler Space, hinting that big mass could be circling the star.
Boyajian also mentioned in a recently published paper that the star sends out bizarre light pattern. Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, is set to publish more on the light pattern. He has claimed that it could be caused by "swarm of megastructures" designed to collect energy from the star, according to the site.
"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright told Ross Andersen of The Atlantic. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."
Now, Wright, Boyajian and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley are joining hands to come up with a proposal to set up a massive radio dish to study if the star emits radio waves that signal technological activity.
