Jennifer Hackett reports that last week the Internet was abuzz with rumors of a strange star that some suggested might host an extraterrestrial construction. Astronomers say that scenario is a slim possibility. A more likely explanation is that the weird star, called KIC 8462852, is orbited by a swarm of comets, which is a pretty interesting idea on its own. But either way, this intriguing star might never have been found. The oddball was just one of thousands of stars being monitored by NASA Kepler telescope, which searches for the telltale dips in star light caused when exoplanets pass in front of it. Computers spot most of the promising planet candidates in the data, but this star would have fallen through the cracks if volunteer citizen scientists had not flagged its unusual signature. This would not have been picked up by a computer algorithm, says Yale, Tabetha Boyajian, who manages the Planet Hunters crowd-sourcing project to analyze Kepler data. We were not looking for something like this ... but there it is.
The volunteers human eyes noticed that the light from KIC 8462852 sometimes got fainter by as much as 20%. Typical stars in the Kepler field dim by about 1%, and even then it takes a very large, Jupiter-size exoplanet to cause such a decrease. And whereas exoplanets create dimming at regular intervals, KIC 8462852 dips were not periodic but random. When the Planet Hunters volunteers referred the star to astronomers for further review, Boyajian at first doubted the observations. The first thing we think is there is something wrong with the data, says Boyajian, the lead author on an arXiv paper about the bizarre star. But her team rigorously checked their equipment and found no technical errors to explain the peculiar light signal. These [dimming] events last from a couple of days to a couple of months. And that is strange, Boyajian says.
The most plausible explanation the Boyajian team came up with was a number of exocomets... a Dyson sphere anyone?
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