Okay, so you’ve probably seen the reports of a “giant alien megastructure orbiting distant star” pop up all over your social media feeds last week. They called it “the most mysterious star in the galaxy.” They also said we’ve possibly found signs of an advanced civilization.

Seriously?

Obviously, we had some, ahem, doubts, about these claims.

It all started with an inconspicuous quote in an Atlantic article from Penn State astronomer Jason Wright who remarked that, “This looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The thing is, Jason Wright isn’t some crazy Ancient Aliens conspiracist (looking at you, History Channel). He’s a legitimate and esteemed academic. Could this be true?

And the mysterious star in question? KIC 8462852.

It originally caught the attention of scientists like Tabetha Boyajian, Ph.D, who penned a paper on the star, and noticed it exhibiting some strange behavior.

The star frequently dimmed, which isn’t unusual in itself. Whenever a planet passes by a star, it blocks its light. Since a planet orbits a star, this dimming is usually on schedule. In fact, this is how we discover new planets—by observing the dimming patterns of stars.

But this star’s dimming behavior didn’t have any sort of pattern. It was erratic—so we know that whatever is causing the star to dim is probably not a planet.

It’s hard to know exactly what’s causing the behavior, since it’s a whopping 1,400 light years away, which means it would take a space probe millions of years to travel there.

That’s where Jason Wright comes in. Coincidently, he was writing a paper on how to search for advanced alien civilizations.

An alien civilization could, theoretically, harness the power of stars by building giant megastructures that surround it. We could detect these megastructures by observing a star’s dimming behavior.

Artist’s rendition of a Dyson Sphere: a superstructure that could harness the power of stars (Kevin Gill/CCBY)

When Boyajian showed Wright the dimming data from her report, he called up the Berkeley SETI Research Center, an organization that searches for extraterrestrial intelligence.

“[They were] initially skeptical, but Tabby and I convinced [them] this wasn’t some sort of glitch of the telescope or mistake we had made; this is a really strange object,” Wright tells Upvoted.

We spoke with the man himself to find out the odds of this actually being a giant alien megastructure. Here’s what he had to say:

Why is this star so important?

Jason Wright: This star gets dimmer in complex, hard to understand ways, suggesting many, star-sized, irregularly-shaped objects are blocking it.

Why isn’t the dimming caused by another planet?

Planets only block, at best, around one percent of the light of a star. This star dims by up to 22 percent.

How could an advanced civilization harness a star’s energy by building megastructures?

We don’t know, but there is an old hypothesis among SETI researchers that advanced alien civilizations could build giant, planet- or star-sized structures orbiting their star for any number of reasons (solar energy collection, giant telescopes, “beacons”…). Luc Arnold pointed out in 2005 that Kepler would be able to detect them if they passed in front of their star.

Okay, so what are the chances that this is an alien structure?

Very low. Near zero.

Do you think there’s an advanced civilization out there, somewhere?

I don’t know. That’s why I look: to find out.

What could be causing the star’s strange dimming behavior?

The best current guess, advanced by Dr. Boyajian’s team, is that it is caused by giant swarms of giant comets. Circumstellar disks and gigantic ring systems have been known in other contexts to cause similar dimmings, but only around young stars. This star appears to be old.