In an article posted in The Atlantic, Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University talked about his new report on the “bizarre” star system KIC 8462852. He went on to further suggest that the objects could be a “swarm of megastructures”.
“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told 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.
But KIC 8462852 was emitting a stranger light pattern than any of the other stars in Kepler’s search for habitable planets.
Kepler works by analysing light from distant places in the universe — looking for changes that take place when planets move in front of their stars. But the dip in starlight from KIC 8462852 doesn’t seem to be the normal pattern for a planet.
Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale told The Atlantic:
“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.”
*More on this story down below*
What about within the church? Do we believe in life on other planets? What are your thoughts? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
Members of Kepler’s “Planet Hunters” team – a group of ‘citizen scientists’ tasked with analyzing the data from the 150,000 stars Kepler was watching, tagged the star as “interesting” and “bizarre” because it was surrounded by a mass of matter in tight formation back in 2011.
This was consistent with the mass of debris that surrounds a young star just as it did with our sun before the planets formed. However this star wasn’t young and the debris must have been deposited around it fairly recently or it would have been clumped together by gravity – or swallowed by the star itself.
Is this evidence of life on other planets? Perhaps. Leave us your thoughts below.
