“When Planet Hunters users were classifying the Kepler data, they came across this one star that didn’t fit into any category that they had seen before,” Boyajian said. “So they started talking about it, and talking about it. It took a while for this discussion to reach the Planet Hunters science team. When I first learned about it, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought if it weren’t for some of the experienced Planet Hunters users I know personally convincing me to look at the data more closely. At first, I just thought the data was bad. If it weren’t for citizen scientists, this is something we would have missed.”

One of the most powerful things about citizen science projects, Boyajian said, is that citizens can identify trends or discover things that are really cool that scientists wouldn’t have been looking for. “This was a serendipitous discovery that happened because a group of people was sifting through the dataset. It likely wouldn’t have been found otherwise.”

Boyajian published a paper about KIC 8462852 in 2016, and as a researcher at LSU continues to study this particular star, amongst other stars, in collaboration with various citizen groups and amateur observers. In her 2016 paper, coauthored by researchers at various other institutions and even amateur astronomers, Boyajian concluded that the most likely explanation for the light dips in data from the star was the passage of a family of exocomet or planetesimal fragments, or debris left over from comet collisions. One of the strangest and most unlikely explanations that others have suggested is that an alien megastructure surrounds the star. Brad Schaefer, a professor of in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at LSU, has also published data about Tabby’s Star revealing that the star has been experiencing a strange long-term dimming over time.

To really figure out what’s going on with this star, Boyajian and collaborators need more data.