Strangest Star Light Pattern in Milky Way Galaxy — Are There Megastructures Orbiting KIC 8462852?

by Linda Moulton Howe, Earthfiles:

“We do know that it takes weeks (for light blocker) to pass in front of the star.
… And the dimming is almost random. That suggests that whatever’s blocking the star’s
light has a very complex structure. … And there’s a lot of them.”

– Jason Thomas Wright, Ph.D., Penn State Astronomer

Last week on October 22nd, senior scientist Gerald Harp at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California, reported to Universe Today: “We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together — or alien intelligence.” He was talking about a very strange star that astronomers call KIC 8462852. This large, mature star 1,480 light-years from Earth has the strangest star light dimming and brightening pattern of some 150,000 stars in the Milky Way Galaxy studied by the Kepler Space Telescope and Planet Hunters project. Kepler was launched by NASA on March 7, 2009, specifically to look for Earth-like planets orbiting other stars.

On September 14, 2015, Professor Tabitha Boyajian, Yale University astronomer, published in the Royal Astronomical Society journal a 14-page paper with graphs of what the Kepler Telescope has observed the past four years. Normally a planet orbiting a distant star will cause the star’s light to dim about 1% as seen from Earth. But KIC has had a series of dimming downs — one as much as 22%. The implication is that something gigantic is periodically coming between KIC and Earth.

See original paper at top of Websites below.

Various suggestions have ranged from instrument defects or artifacts to huge interstellar dust clumps to a swarm of comets. Helping Professor Boyajian sort out what could be happening at the big, mysterious star is Prof. Jason Thomas Wright, Ph.D., Associate Professor in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at Penn State in University Park, Pennsylvania. There he studies nearby stars, their ages and activity levels, and most of all their planetary systems. He finds and characterizes new planets around other stars using the Hobby-Eberly Telescope and Keck Observatory. He has written up a protocol of ten characteristics that advanced intelligence design around stars might produce, such as— if the object periodically blocking the star’s light is not circular, then the dimming and brightening would not be symmetrical.

That’s exactly one of KIC’s characteristics — the dramatic dimming and brightening is not symmetric, implying perhaps megastructures orbiting the star. But where did the megastructures come from? That’s why since the appearance of Prof. Boyajian’s paper that media around the world have taken notice. The Washington Post headlined: “The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure.”

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