The world's largest radio telescope, the Chinese radio observatory FAST, will study the extremely unusual star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, whose unusual dimming and "blinking" may indicate the presence of a super-developed alien civilization in its vicinity, the South China Morning Post reported.
“The addition of the FAST telescope to our search fantastically expands our capabilities, and allows us to 'probe' literally every corner of this star system for the presence of alien radio signals. We are very pleased to be able to work with colleagues in China, as FAST is the most sensitive telescope in the world in its range,”said Andrew Siemion, Deputy Director of Breakthrough Listen.
In mid-October 2015, astronomers from Yale University spoke about unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, the intensity of which has decreased twice by almost a quarter over the past seven years. These "blinks" for the first time indicated the possibility of the presence in its vicinity of the so-called Dyson sphere, a trap of the energy of the star, created by a super-developed alien civilization.
Initially, scientists assumed that such a "blinking" of the star could be caused by a swarm of comets that blocked its light from observers on Earth, but in January 2016, the American astronomer Bradley Schaefer discovered that the brightness of KIC 8462852 inexplicably dropped by 0.16 magnitude over the last century, which called into question this theory. Subsequently, scientists working with the Kepler telescope confirmed that the brightness of this star is decreasing.
The discoverer of this star, Tabetha Boyjian, and a number of scientists from the University of California at Berkeley, announced in late October the beginning of observations of this star as part of the Breakthrough Listen project, launched last year by Stephen Hawking and Yuri Milner to search for intelligent life for outside the solar system.
In addition to FAST, another large radio telescope also takes part in these observations - the Green Banks Observatory, one of the most sensitive radio dishes in the world, which, for example, is also used by the Russian ground-space interferometer RadioAstron as the ground “half” of the giant virtual telescope the size of the Earth.
According to Jin Zhu, director of the Beijing Planetarium, FAST may start observing the alien star before it is fully built and has the ability to change its configuration, but this may not be possible in the next two years due to the extremely dense observing programs dedicated to "serious" scientific research.
An additional problem is that Chinese astronomers are not sure that humanity will be able to correctly interpret artificial signals that FAST can theoretically receive from the KIC 8462852 system, prove that they were indeed generated by aliens and decipher them. However, scientists hope that the FAST leadership will give them at least a minimal amount of observing time in the near future.
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