The astronomers who once speculated that an alien megastructure might be responsible for the weirdly fluctuating light from a distant star have now fully ruled out that way-out explanation.
Their conclusion, reported in a paper published today by Astrophysical Journal Letters, is based on a crowdfunded analysis of the light patterns in a wide range of wavelengths.
The authors of the paper include Louisiana State University’s Tabetha Boyajian, who led the discovery team for the star known as KIC 8462852 or “Tabby’s Star”; and Penn State’s Jason Wright, who first proposed the alien-megastructure hypothesis.
