A team of astronomers is going to investigate the mysterious star KIC 8462852, or simply "Tabby", for the presence of highly developed xenocivilizations in its system. Scientists believe that the phenomenon of unusual fading of a star may be associated with the activity of representatives of intelligent alien life.
Astronomers have been debating for several years about the possibility of extraterrestrial life on planets orbiting the star KIC 8462852 (aka Tabby or, less commonly, Boyajian). This star is located in the constellation Cygnus, and is 1488 light years distant from the Sun. Now researchers are going to study the star itself and its surroundings using the latest equipment in the hope that this will shed light on the mysterious anomaly of the star and provide answers to some questions of interest to scientists.
The Tabby phenomenon is as follows: in September 2015, several astronomers published the results of studies of changes in the star's luminosity, which attracted the attention of the world media. Registration of such changes was carried out by the Kepler space observatory, as part of the exoplanet search program. Usually, due to the passage of a planet in front of a star, its light dims slightly for a short time, which is repeated at regular intervals. However, the star KIC 8462852 turned out to be an exception: its luminosity fell by up to 22 percent, and such falls were observed over different periods of time (from 5 to 80 days), which led to the emergence of a large number of hypotheses. The strange light curves of this star were noticed by volunteers of Planet Hunters, a crowdsourced exoplanet search project in Kepler data.some of whom became co-authors of the final article describing the phenomenon.
Even a planet the size of Jupiter will block only a tiny fraction of the light, primarily due to the colossal difference in size that typically occurs between a star and its orbiting planets. Currently, the most plausible explanation is a group of very large comets, but scientists say that in this case, too little heat and infrared radiation comes from the star. Astronomer Jason Wright jokingly suggested that it might be a giant structure created by aliens, but even so, the lack of additional IR radiation raises big questions. Be that as it may, the search for any signals or other signs of highly developed xenocivilization has not been crowned with success at the moment.
But the scientists decided to move on. Tabeta Boyajian, the star's discoverer, teamed up with the Breakthrough Listen project (BLP) to investigate KIC 8462852 and its system for radio waves. BLP is the brainchild of Silicon Valley, which took about $ 100 million from the pocket of entrepreneur Yuri Milner. The project is associated with several radio telescopes around the globe, including the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Parkes Observatory in Australia, and FAST, a huge Chinese telescope. Milner's team has developed technology that encompasses all telescopes, and allows one to simultaneously scan billions of different communication channels to look for patterns that indicate the existence of intelligent (in our minds) life.
Starting today, Byjian, Wright and astronomer Andrew Simion will use the Green Bank Telescope to study Tabby. They will observe the star for 8 hours for three nights over the next two months, but the analysis of a huge amount of incoming information will take no less than a month. In the evening, the team intends to scan the 1-12 gigahertz range, which covers the frequencies within which mobile phones, satellite TV and other technologies operate. According to the team of researchers, "the scanning will be powerful enough, its effectiveness can be compared to a powerful radar here on Earth." Of course, this will only work if the alleged aliens use radio signals as a means of transmitting information. Unfortunately, no definitive proofnor can this study conclusively disprove the existence of alien life - the probabilistic range is such that we can simply search in the wrong place, at the wrong time, at the wrong wavelengths, or completely wrong patterns. While scientists cannot figure out what exactly causes the unusual fading of the star, aliens are just one of the hypotheses that we have.