The data obtained with the Kepler space telescope allowed to make a sensational assumption.
Captivating star of happiness
“We haven’t seen anything like this star before,” says Tabetha Boyajian, the leader of the research team at Yale University. - It is so strange that we double-checked the data obtained with the telescope several times. But no mistakes were found.
NASA's Kepler Space Telescope - aka Planet Seeker - was launched into Earth's orbit in May 2009. Aims at a small section of the Milky Way, located between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra.
The telescope searched for exoplanets - planets around other stars - through the so-called transit method. That is, he watched whether the brightness of the star changed from time to time. And it changes when the star's disk obscures something. For example, a planet. Astronomers determine their presence by fluctuations in brightness. And then, with the help of ground radio telescopes aimed at the "suspicious" star, the guess is confirmed or refuted.
The hypothesis implying the activity of aliens should always be the very last of the considered, scientists say.
Promotional video:
Photo: x-file
In 2013, Kepler broke down. But before, every 30 minutes, he recorded the parameters of 150 thousand stars in his field of view. And provided astronomers with data for many years to come. Decrypt and decrypt them. What scientists are doing now.
And here's the result: the star KIC 8462852, located 1480 light years from Earth, attracted attention back in 2011 - it changed its brightness in a supernatural way. Sometimes the luminous flux from it decreased by 80%. As if something was shading her, but not periodically, but for different periods of time - from 5 to 80 days.
If not aliens, then who?
- The hypothesis implying the activity of aliens should always be the very last of the considered, - commented the discovery of Jason Wright, an astronomer at the University of Pennsylvania. “But in this case, the colleagues discovered what could be expected from them - from the aliens.
Tabeta and colleagues believe that the scintillation of KIC 8462852 is caused by many objects around the star. They block the light.
Scientists tried to prove that objects are of natural origin - for example, these are fragments of planets colliding here. But there were always facts that contradicted "reasonable" hypotheses. There is still one - "unreasonable". The fact that KIC 8462852 is located in the so-called Dyson Sphere - a kind of shell built by local inhabitants that allows you to capture the radiation of a star and use this energy.
The appearance of such spheres in highly developed civilizations was predicted back in 1960 by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson. He believed that the spheres can be either closed or composed of many separate spacecraft. On them, representatives of extraterrestrial intelligence place power plants, industries and even housing.
A group of astronomers from the American SETI Institute, which is looking for signals from extraterrestrial civilizations, listened to KIC 8462852 for two weeks, then three more. But, alas, I did not catch anything civilized. It was not possible to detect any short energy impulses that would indicate the movement of spaceships in the vicinity of the observed star.
Now skeptical scientists are more and more inclined to believe that the anomalous decrease in the brightness of KIC 8462852 was caused by a cloud of comets flying by. But this is just a hypothesis. Even its author - astronomer Massimo Marengo - is not sure. And he does not completely abandon Dyson's probable sphere.
“There is no convincing evidence that the star is not surrounded by any megastructures,” says the scientist. - Her behavior is really very strange. As a rule, this indicates some unknown physical phenomenon.
In short, the mystery of the winking star remains unsolved.
BTW
Nobel Prize for Little Green Men
In 1967, Jolcelyn Bell Burnell, a graduate student working in the group of British radiophysicist Anthony Hewish, was fortunate enough to catch strictly periodic pulses of radio waves coming from deep space. The discovery was kept secret for several months, believing that they had finally intercepted an alien message. Its source was even given the name LGM-1 - short for Little Green Men - "little green men." Soon three more similar sources were found.
Alas, it turned out that the radio signals are "sent" by rapidly rotating neutron stars. Radiation comes from them in narrow beams. Due to the rotation, the beams hit the dishes of radio telescopes at regular intervals - as if by pulses. This creates the illusion of some meaningful transmission. The sources of radio signals are called pulsars. And although by 1968 the suspicion was removed from the brothers in mind, the discovery of pulsars became a sensation. In 1974, Hewish was awarded the Nobel Prize for them.