Astronomers fromSETIare looking at likely radio signal coming from the peculiar asterisk that has been in the news program recently over the estimate that it could host an " foreign megastructure . "
" We are looking at it with the Allen Telescope Array [ ATA ] , " Seth Shostak , a senior astronomer at the SETI ( Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence ) Institute in Mountain View , California , toldSpace.com , although he added that the great unwashed " should perhaps moderate their exuberance with the lessons of history . "
The ace , KIC 8462852 , was discovered by Kepler , the NASA space scope that look for planets . It does this by observing regular dimming of stars due to the planet passing in front of them , or transiting . It has so far found 1,013 confirm exoplanets in about 440 stellar system , but there are thousands more potential drop that are waiting to be aver .
Kepler ’s reflexion of KIC 8462852 has reported some unusual action : the ballistic capsule detected temporary plunge in brightness that are ordered with small masses revolve together .
KIC 8462852 is also lie with as the WTF star , free-base on the deed of conveyance of the paper ( Where ’s The Flux ? ) by Tabetha Boyajian in which the funny object was talk about for the first sentence . The most probable explanation for the phenomenon is a swarm of comet which have been suddenly push towards to the star by a monolithic object , like a giant satellite or a top virtuoso .
Another account , substantially less probable but more popular , is that the illumination is stopped by a giant hokey structure , like a Dyson swarm : a supposed system of place satellites design to capture a important amount of luminousness from the sensation to supply aliens with energy .
Several studies have been proposed to observe - up on Kepler ’s observations , and SETI was the first to start one . By using the ATA , SETI is blend to wait for radio emissions of artificial origin from around the WTF star . The ATA has 42 antennas that measure 6.1 by 7.0 meters wide ( 20 by 23 feet ) .
Although an alien find is improbable , these studies are important for scientific advancement . When pulsars were first come across by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Antony Hewish they were nickname “ little green man , ” as they were incertain the intermittent wireless signal was whole of natural blood line . With the discovery of a second signaling like this , the alien idea was completely abandoned and we now acknowledge that they were grow by fast - spinning , superdense star that emit regular beams of irradiation .
This study is only the first of on a potentially long series of observation by SETI base on Kepler ’s information . Theplanet Orion ’s dataimplies the hypothesis of billions of inhabitable rocky planets in the Milky Way – billions of potential leads for SETI stargazer to chase .
Image Credit : Allen Telescope Array by Bruce Fingerhood viaFlickr . CC BY - NC 2.0
