The unusual "blinking" of the star KIC 8462852, which some scientists believe to be traces of the presence of highly evolved aliens, could not have resulted from the collision of several planets and the formation of a cloud of dust, astronomers say in an article published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
In mid-October, astronomers from Yale University spoke about unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, whose luminosity decreased by almost a quarter. 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.
According to Lars Kristensen of the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (USA), the discoverers of these flashes had three "natural" theories that explained these mysterious fluctuations in the brightness of the star - the collision of small planets, the cluster of asteroids at one point in the system, or the passage the whole "swarm" of comets on the disk of the star.
Christensen and his colleagues suggested that the implementation of the first scenario should leave traces visible to us - a cloud of dust, periodically covering the star, and many debris and dust grains throughout the system. This dust, as scientists explain, should be clearly visible to radio telescopes operating in the microwave frequency range.
Guided by this idea, the authors of the article traced the KIC 8462852 system using two telescopes - the SMA operating in the millimeter range, and the SCUBA-2 camera on the James Maxwell telescope operating in the submillimeter range of the spectrum.
Long-term observations of KIC 8462852 did not yield any results - neither the one nor the other telescope was able to record the presence of any significant dust accumulations either in the inner or outer regions of this star system. The mass of dust, according to the calculations of the Christensen group, is about 3 million times lower than the mass of the Earth in its near part, and 6,000 times lower in almost the entire system.
This means that planetary collisions could hardly have occurred in the vicinity of KIC 8462852 - this amount of dust, according to scientists, is equivalent to only a tenth of the mass of a large dwarf planet like Ceres, which is clearly less than it should have remained after the collision of two even small planets.
The absence of dust, according to Christensen and his colleagues, speaks in favor of the "comet" theory, but it is also not without problems - according to the calculations of planetary scientists, the drop in the brightness of KIC 8462852, recorded by Kepler, would require a simultaneous collision of 30 large comets and their subsequent unification into a swarm, which is also quite unlikely.
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Does this mean that the "blinking" of KIC 8462852 is really caused by aliens? According to Christensen, these irregular drops in brightness can be explained by other, less known phenomena.
For example, the authors of the article believe that the drops in brightness could be caused by a giant gas and dust disk 300 million kilometers long orbiting this star, which is located towards us with its "end", which makes it virtually invisible to us. In general, we can say that the mystery of the "alien blinking" KIC 8462852 still remains unsolved.