We’ve got some promising new discoveries coming from the NASA headquarters – their Kepler Telescope has come across a humongous artificial megastructure which for now is suspected to have been built by an advanced alien civilization.
The Kepler telescope doesn’t just search for small, rocky worlds orbiting distant stars, it can also find numerous space phenomena like star spots, stellar flares and planetary rings among others. However, this time it has stumbled across a signal of an alleged massive artificial structure orbiting a star just 1,500 light years away from Earth.
Scientists have explored all scientific reasons and explanations and are now postulating that the massive megastructure is most likely an artificial construction built by an advanced alien civilization way up on the Kardashev scale of comparison.
How does this megastructure function? Well similarly to a supersized solar array, it orbits its host star, stockpiling the energy it collects and sending it back to the source. What’s more amazing is that the structure is so massive that as it orbits its host it blocks a significant amount of starlight.
Whenever the Kepler telescope discovers an exoplanet it’s usually a typical planet shape – round. But the structure it discovered this time isn’t typical at all, it isn’t round and its behavior is peculiar.
The journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society received a paper on the subject, in which a particular star named KIC 8462852 is described.
Tabetha Boyajian, researcher at Yale University wrote:
“Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregulary shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the twenty percent level. We’d never seen anything like this star, it was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
The study was mostly about the two interesting anomalies spotted at KIC 8462852, the first one was somewhere between Kepler mission’s day 788 and 795, while the second one was between days 1510 to 1570.
During the first anomaly, the telescope spotted a single transit causing a star brightness to decrease by 15%, while the second anomaly manifested as a burst of a couple of transits, resulting in a brightness drop of up to 22%. What’s even more interesting is that such a decrease in the brightness of a star could have only been caused by an extremely massive object blocking its starlight.
We know that our galaxy exists for over 13 billion years so it’s not a hard thing to believe in the existence of an alien civilization somewhere out there, in the vast universe. And it’s even more understandable that that civilization could have the technology it needs to build such structures around their stars.
Jason Wright, astronomer from Penn State University, said in a statement for the Atlantic:
“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
After exhausting all other plausible scenarios, the researchers concluded that the anomaly is probably the result of a group of dormant comets recently disturbed by a nearby star. But their theory is somewhat shaky at best so it wasn’t long until other researchers started postulating their own theories, the main one being that the structure is a result of a super-engineering project constructed by a Type 2 alien civilization on the Kardashev scale.
According to the Kardashev scale this type of aliens are capable of using up all the available energy radiating from a star. By using a vast shell or series of rings around a star, they could construct a Dyson sphere-like structure which would block out the star from sight in visible wavelengths. However, once the alien civilization uses up all the solar energy it would be shifted to longer wavelengths and most likely lost as infrared radiation.
These peculiar findings have perplexed the scientists who are now making efforts to point a radio antenna towards KIC 8462852 to understand this anomaly better. This will enable them to spot any artificial radio signals coming from the star and finally figure out if there’s an intelligent Type 2 alien civilization just around the corner.