He’s not saying it’s aliens – but an astronomer has raised new questions about KIC 8462852, the strange star that stirred up a debate about “alien megastructures” months ago.
In a paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters, Lousiana State University’s Bradley Schaefer reviews archival photographic plates that show KIC 8462852 at various times going back to 1890. He reports that the star, which is 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, faded by about 20 percent between the 1890s and the 1980s.
“This century-long dimming is completely unprecedented for any F-type main sequence star,” Schaefer writes.
KIC 8462852’s dimming was already worthy of note, due to observations by NASA’s Kepler space telescope that revealed unusual episodes during which the star faded by as much as 20 percent. That led Penn State astronomer Jason Wright to observe that such a pattern was consistent with what you’d expect if aliens were building an energy-generating megastructure known as a “Dyson sphere” around the star.
