The mysterious "alien star" KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus is unlikely to be surrounded by the so-called Dyson sphere - a man-made megastructure capable of absorbing the energy of a star and making it "blink," according to an article published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“Most likely, the dimming and brightening of this star is associated with the presence of dust clouds in its orbit. The new data we have collected shows that this dust blocks different amounts of light at different wavelengths. For this reason, we can confidently say that this matter is not opaque, like a planet or, for example, an alien megastructure,”says Tabetha Boyajian from Yale University (USA).
In mid-October 2015, and Boyagian, her colleagues spoke about unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, which may indicate the presence in its vicinity of the so-called Dyson sphere, 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 magnitudes over the last century, which called into question this theory.
Initially, a number of skeptics tried to deny the very fact of the tarnishing of KIC 8462852 in the short and long term, but later scientists working with the Kepler telescope, as well as Russian astronomers from the Pulkovo Observatory, confirmed that the brightness of this luminary was declining in the past.
According to Boyagian, the first dimming of the "alien stars" were discovered virtually by accident, and therefore astronomers were not ready to observe them and reveal the reasons for what caused KIC 8462852 to drastically decrease brightness. This May, thanks to a dedicated Kickstarter campaign and the help of scientists from all of the world's leading ground and space observatories, Boyajian and her colleagues comprehensively examined four new Tabby Star tarnishes.
One of the goals of these observations, as noted by Boyagian at the end of May this year, was to assess how "opaque" the object is, preventing the light from KIC 8462852 from reaching Earth. It is elementary to carry out such measurements - it is enough to compare the brightness of the luminary at different wavelengths that do not go beyond the optical part of the spectrum.
If the object is opaque and consists of a solid piece of solid matter, then it will equally strongly reduce the brightness of the "Tabby Star" at all wavelengths. If it consists of small particles of dust or cosmic "pebbles", some of the rays would pass through their clouds better than others.
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As it turned out, the second scenario was much closer to the truth than the first. This sharply narrows the number of possible candidates for the role of the "culprit" of all the blinking of the star, and makes it impossible for the existence of the Dyson sphere in the orbit of KIC 8462852.
Scientists are now continuing to observe the "Tabby Star" with an optical telescope at the Las Cambres Observatory in California. New tarnishing of this mysterious luminary, Boyajian and her team hope, will help to understand how these dust clouds originated and where they are.
