Under the watchful eye of the Kepler Space Telescope, a new mystery in the form of strange dimming of the star KIC 8462852 has been observed. By gaining data on the light dimmed from the star, which is 1500 light years away, and 150,000 other stars in the night sky, Kepler’s astronomers have been able to observe the likelihood of orbiting planets. Most planets dim the light of a star 1% to 2% for a small fraction of time (when observed from Earth). However, star KIC 8462852 was dimmed significantly more, as much as 20%, an unprecedented occurrence among stars as mature as KIC 8462852.

Interestingly, the Kepler telescope observes so much data (150,000 stars!) that the astronomers delegate data mining to the ordinary “citizen scientists” at the website Planet Hunter. Several citizen scientists reported the strange data coming from KIC 8462852. For a younger star, the significant light dimming, which suggests a scattering of matter around the sun, would be expected. As the star would grow in age, the matter would condense into planets- a natural consequence of gravity. However, younger stars put off a type of infrared light that KIC 8462852 doesn’t.

Tabetha Boyajian, a post doctorate student at Yale, tackled this problem by systematically going through the natural phenomenon and the machine failures that could have resulted in the data. Eventually, Tabetha Boyajian found that the only other possibility for the event occurring would be if another sun passed close enough to KIC 8462852 for it pick up some of its debris. The likelihood of this event occurring is extremely low however, especially considering the limited time frame the star was observed.

Another possibility, that Jason Wright from the University of Pennsylvania is tackling, is that the structures were made by extraterrestrial life. Structures that orbit a sun, called Dyson structures, have been identified by scientists as an indicator of advanced intelligence. The structures would offer an extremely efficient form of solar energy by orbiting close to the sun. Boyajian is working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to write a proposal to point a large satellite to gather more data, and use the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico to detect possible radio waves emitted by a technological source.