Astronomers call it the most mysterious star in the entire galaxy. 1200 light-years away, in the constellation Cygnus, it shimmers and dims in a way never seen before. Irregular flare patterns indicate something periodically blocking the star. Researchers have offered many explanations, including black holes, cometary swarms and interstellar clouds - but only one came up. And yes, we are talking about an extraterrestrial civilization.
Unexplained ripple
The first data forced astronomers to check the telescope for damage. But the information from "Kepler" turned out to be correct, no distortions can explain the behavior of the star. Gradually, the researchers rejected all the real reasons. Spectral analysis ruled out luminosity changes due to internal processes, dust clouds do not hide a star, comets and asteroids also do not affect the brightness decay patterns.
The only explanation
Ultimately, the study's lead author, Tabeta Boyajian, encouraged the scientific community to stop shrugging off a single plausible explanation. Flickering Tabby indicates that an extraterrestrial civilization is building an astro-engineering structure to use the energy of its star. Theoretically, the possibility of the existence of the so-called Dyson Sphere is quite real - physicists talked about this at the beginning of the last century.
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Energy sphere theory
In 1937, Olaf Stapledon, in his novel The Star Writer, suggested that an advanced civilization that needed energy would eventually need to get it from its star. Inspired by this idea, physicist Freeman Dyson put forward a new hypothesis about the search for intelligent life, focusing on these megastructures, which are now called Dyson Spheres. Already in 2005, astronomer Luke Arnold suggested that a similar structure could also be used to create a flickering signal that sends a kind of code into space - something like Morse code.
Perhaps we are dealing with an extremely advanced civilization that has built a large storage network to accumulate huge reserves of energy received from the star. Perhaps the irregularity of the light curve suggests that artificially created objects revolve around the star - Andrew Simion, Dean of the Department of Astronomy at the University of California.
Scientists support
The scientific community accepted the script of Tabetha Boyajian as the only one that fully explains the changes taking place with the star. Of course, astronomers have repeatedly told the press that aliens should be the very last hypothesis worth keeping in mind. However, if it looks like a mouse, squeaks like a mouse and loves cheese, then calling it an elephant is simply stupid.
Star under the microscope
Since October 19, 2015, the star system KIC 8462852 has been under the vigilant control of powerful radio telescopes. Next year, the powerful Green Bank structures will be connected to the observation, and in a year later NASA plans to launch the first space telescopes into orbit, created as part of the exoplanet search program.
We are losing her
In the course of the study, scientists found out that Tabby's star not only twinkles, but constantly decreases in brightness. In three years, the brightness has dropped by 3% - an unprecedented figure. For comparison, astronomers checked 200 nearby stars and 355 stars similar in structure to KIC 8462852. The brightness of none of them over the same period of time did not fall by more than 0.34%.
