SOURCE: there-is-almost-certainly-no-alien-megastructures-around-that-mysterious-star: or will the theory hold?..

Alien hunters are abuzz. A mysterious star called KIC 8462852 is their latest hope for finding an intelligent species beyond the Earth. And they are throwing every resource they can to find a way of confirming that aliens exist.

In a study first released online in September, a team of scientists has shown that KIC 8462852 has a mysterious flicker—for its age and type, the star should be much brighter than telescopes show it to be. While the research has not yet been reviewed for publication, it is already stirring up excitement in the scientific community and beyond; after eliminating other theories, some suggest that the only explanation for the flicker is the presence of light-blocking megastructures, built by aliens.

 The star’s light is being partially blocked by a huge solar panel construction.

Here are the hypotheses they eliminated: The star could be surrounded by cloud of dust…but it is too old to have such a planet-forming disk. A collision of planets could have caused the formation of a thick layer of debris…but such an event is too brief in cosmological timescales to be spotted by human telescopes. Finally, there could be a swarm of comets creating the shade…but calculations show the dimming is far too much to be explained by comets alone.

All this leaves one theory standing: the solar panel: