Search for 'alien megastructure' on distant star underway

Mary Bowerman | USA TODAY Network

Scientists have begun pointing a cluster of radio dishes at a mysterious star that some astronomers believe could harbor an "alien megastructure."

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) focused the Allen Telescope Array located in Northern California on star KIC 8462852 on Friday. SETI is in the process of switching out equipment to see if "more sensitive receivers" can pick up a signal they've missed so far, according to Seth Shostak, a senior astronomer at the SETI Institute.

"The distance of this system is 1400-light-years away, so if there are signals we may not be able to pick them up because they are so weak," Shostak told USA TODAY Network.

The star is just one of 160,000 stars that NASA's Kepler Space Telescope has spotted since 2009, though its unusual light pattern has captured the attention of many.

Kepler hunts for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way Galaxy by measuring the brightness of stars and looking for tiny dips in light patterns that could signify an orbiting planet. In most cases, when a planet is orbiting a star the Kepler measures a uniform light pattern.

However, the light pattern emitting from KIC 8462852 is anything but uniform, said Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University specializing in astronomy.

“You see all sorts of weird stuff in space, but you start to recognize general patterns and can attribute certain shapes of light curves to different phenomena, but this star was unlike anything we’d ever seen,” Boyajian said.

The strange pattern of light suggests a large mass of matter is circling KIC 8462852. So far, 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.

"There are a hundred ways in which you could block the light from the star and almost all of them involve natural phenomenon: clouds of dust, rocks ,asteroids. History tells us that when you see something unusual it's natural tendency to think aliens (...) but chances are it's not," Shostak said.

And while the light pattern is strange, this isn't the first star to have an odd shaped light curve, said Steve Howell, a project scientist on the Kepler & K2 Missions at the NASA Ames Research Center. Four years ago, Kepler spotted another star, KIC 4110611, which also had a very strange light pattern, Howell said.

"It turned out to be a very unusual, but not alien, set of five stars that orbit each other," he said. "Rarely the stars would all line up their orbital planes, so we would see each of the stars crossing in front of the other stars which would make this very weird light curve that took a while to interpret."

The Allen Telescope Array runs day and night and will alert scientists if they pick up wavelengths that could be consistent with coming from a technological source.

SETI is no stranger to searching for radio signals from space. Just months ago, the organization received a large injection from a Russian Internet billionaire named Yuri Milner, Popular Mechanics reports. The funds will beef up radio telescopes in West Virginia and Australia that have been quietly listening for radio signals from outer space for a half-century in hopes of finding intelligent life.

“SETI has looked and so far come up empty," Howell said. "It doesn’t mean they should stop looking, but maybe it means radio signals won't be the way we communicate or we will never receive radio signals from outer space."

And while Howell doesn't discount that there could be life in space, this probably isn't the moment when people will discover it.

"I don’t believe this is the signal that says, 'Here we are,'" Howell said.

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