When you look at me - I wink at you …
Aliens are already giving us signals this way and that - they almost wink, like Rasputin once from a cold bottle of vodka … A new analysis of data from the Kepler telescope showed that the mysterious star KIC 8462852 (the same one around which in scientific circles the sharpest controversy unfolded), in the vicinity of which a highly developed civilization may exist, decreased its brightness by 3% during the operation of this apparatus in orbit.
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 by almost a quarter in two times in the last 7 years. These "blinks" for the first time indicated the possibility of 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.
A group of astronomers led by Michael Hippke disagreed with him, attributing the fluctuations in brightness to errors in preparing the images. This provoked a whole scientific "war" between Hippke and Schaefer, who began to wage a "correspondence box", exchanging complaints through the pages of scientific publications and materials in the media.
Benjamin Monte of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Center (USA) and Joshua Simon of the Carnegie Institute of Science in Pasadena (USA) defended Schaefer and showed that the brightness of KIC 8462852 has indeed been gradually declining in recent years, having studied images from the Kepler observatory.
The Kepler telescope, as scientists explain, in the first period of its work, which ended after the accident at the beginning of 2013, “looked” not at single stars, but at hundreds of thousands of luminaries simultaneously located at the junction of the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. This allowed Monte and Simon to track how the brightness of KIC 8462852 changed from December 2009, when the telescope was launched, to May 2013.
Promotional video:
As the scientists note, it was not so easy to “pull out” long-term fluctuations in the brightness of stars from the Kepler images, since the telescope was designed to observe short-term decreases in brightness caused by the passage of planets across the luminary disk, and not by mysterious and incomprehensible processes like in the case of KIC 8462852. For example, the automation of the probe often considers longer fluctuations in brightness as various anomalies in the operation of its light-sensitive matrices and corrects them.
Monte and Simon managed to get around all these problems by using not data on the brightness fluctuations of individual stars, but complete images of the entire piece of the night sky, which Kepler looked at from 2009 to 2013. The preparation of such photographs takes a long time, and therefore the probe took them only once a month. This, on the other hand, was enough to evaluate how the brightness of the KIC 8462852 changed.
As Simon and Monte's calculations showed, the brightness of this "alien star" fell at a rate of 0.3% per year, and during the first thousand days of Kepler's operation, it fell by 0.9%. Then it fell even faster, and literally six months after that, it fell by 2%. Then the rate of its decline decreased, and at the current moment it has dropped by 3%.
After confirming Schaefer's claims, astronomers tested whether such a fall was indeed an anomaly by measuring fluctuations in the brightness of other stars.
This analysis showed that KIC 8462852 is indeed a unique and extremely strange luminary, the behavior of which cannot yet be explained by any existing theory. The epic continues!
Alien Star Video: