Researchers have revealed a ‘bizarre’ star they say could be surrounded by a huge alien mega structure. KIC 8462852, located 1480 light-years away, was monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope for more than four years, beginning in 2009. Now researchers say they cannot explain strange fluctuations in the light it emits – leading some to claim it could have a huge alien megastructure in front of it.

Lead author of the study, Tabetha Boyajian, says his group has been looking for alternate explanations since 2011, when “citizen scientists” flagged the star as exceedingly bizarre.Currently, it experiences dips in brightness up to 22%, which could not be the result of a passing exoplanet. Usually, this kind of unexplained activity is the result of a displaced mass of detritus formed within a new star system before gravity has had time to condense or absorb it. But, KIC 8462852, located between between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, is not a new star.

Scientists have also considered that the dips may be caused by debris from a planetary collision. However, they would also expect this kind of collision to produce excess infrared light, which hasn’t been detected. Another explanation involves orbiting comets, but comets virtually never create such drastic changes in light emission.

The absence of any conventional explanation led Tabetha to a more unorthodox line of reasoning: what if the anomalous blockage of light is caused by a Dyson sphere, or more accurately, a Dyson swarm of smaller megastructures.This would fall in line with a recent theory by Clément Vidal, who suggests that irregular energy flows from certain stars may be evidence of Kardashev Type II or III civilizations.
Vidal calls these “starivores,” as they are feeding on the energy of their parent stars. He wrote a Ph.D. thesis on it that suggests the Milky Way Galaxy alone may contain around 2,000 starivores.

Is the star KIC 8462852 our very first glimpse of Kardashev Type II advanced artificial superintelligence wielding Dyson spheres (say that five times fast) to control the energy of its own sun? We may soon know… or we may never.

Via IntelliHub