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Author Topic: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.  (Read 6605 times)

Offline astr0144

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Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« on: October 15, 2015, 02:49:15 am »
Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.

Scientists recently identified an irregular mess of objects orbiting a distant star that defies most natural explanations.



Nestled between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra sits what might be the strangest, most mysterious star in our galaxy. This star, designated as KIC 8462852, is not particularly unusual in and of itself. What's odd is what astronomers have spotted orbitting it: an irregularly-shaped mess of objects that appear unnatural, possibly even alien, reports The Atlantic.

The star was first flagged by amateur astronomers in 2011 for its peculiar dimming pattern, as detected by the Kepler Space Telescope. By themselves, dimming patterns in distant stars are not that usual. In fact, they are what Kepler scientists look for in their hunt for faraway planets. As planets pass in front of their stars, they momentarily block out a portion of the light being emitted by the star, thus revealing themselves. Thousands of exoplanets have been discovered this way in recent years.

The dimming pattern identified in KIC 8462852, however, was unlike any discovered among the over 150,000 stars that have been analyzed by the Kepler Space Telescope. The pattern suggested that KIC 8462852 was surrounded by a whole jumble of objects in extremely tight formation. Such a pattern might be expected from a young star, with a solar system that was first forming. Young solar systems are typically characterized by a messy field of debris, which eventually coalesces into a system of planets as the star's gravity molds and shapes them. But KIC 8462852 is not a young star. A field of dust surrounding a young star would give off infrared light, and excess infrared light is not observed here.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” explained Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

It should be reiterated that this mess of objects is irregularly-shaped. It's not something that should form naturally, not given a sufficient amount of time, anyway. So it's likely that it was deposited there recently, since otherwise such a field of objects would have been shaped into a more regular pattern or swallowed up by the star's gravitational field by now.

So what is it? Scientists have considered a number of scenarios, from instrument defects, to an asteroid belt pileup, to planets crashing into one another. But at this juncture the list of possible explanations has been narrowed to two. First, it's possible that the debris field could be a sea of comets, recently yanked inward into the solar system by the gravity of another close-passing star. This sort of event would represent an extraordinary coincidence, though-- a rare event, one not observed in any other star ever observed.

The second possibility that can't be ruled out is a wild one, an explanation that scientists don't put forward lightly. It's possible that there is no natural explanation for the objects circling KIC 8462852 at all. It's possible they are alien.

“When [I was shown] the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” explained Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, to 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.”

In other words, it could be a swarm of mega-structures put there by E.T.-- our first glimpse at alien technology. Perhaps it's a fleet of alien spacecraft, perhaps a network of stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. You can let your imagination run wild.

The idea has garnered enough momentum that researchers at SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) have submitted a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity. If such radio waves are detected, then things would get serious.

The first observation isn't expected to happen until January, however. Depending on how those measurements go, follow-up research would occur in the ensuing months.

If the truth is out there, it might be found circling KIC 8462852. It could be the most exciting news in the history of astronomy, or just another cosmological coincidence. We may find out soon enough.

http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/space/stories/alien-technology-possibly-spotted-orbiting-distant-star

          =========================

The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/15/the-strange-star-that-has-serious-scientists-talking-about-an-alien-megastructure/

Could These Weird Space Objects Be the First Proof of Intelligent Aliens?



The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence has been running roughly (figuratively and literally, at times) since Frank Drake launched Project Ozma in the late 1950s. In all that searching, it's found only a few stray signals of unknown origin, but no concrete proof that it's aliens at play.

But KIC 8462852? could be the first big breakthrough for SETI,  just a few months after the Breakthrough Listen project injected $100 million into SETI research over 10 years. Originally found through Kepler Space Telescope data, the star has some not-quite-planets around it, objects that cause chaotic dips in the light of the star.







On the one hand, there's the team lead by ?Tabetha Boyajian? at Yale, who, in a paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (Arxiv pre-print here)?, have proposed an unusual asteroid belt, a field of debris, or a series of comets flung by a passing star, all of which are causing fluctuations at very close range to the star, big enough to be seen by Kepler (but not big enough to be a planet.) But the star is old enough that, in this stage in its life, it's unlikely to be a dust disk associated with planetary formation.

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But Berkeley SETI has an alternative hypothesis: that this is the kind of alien megastructure we've always suspected could be around distant stars, true indications of an advanced alien species. It's a tantalizing possibility, and one the Berkeley SETI team are drafting up the proposal to follow-up on.

It will point a large radio telescope (either the NRAO's Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia or the Parkes Observatory scope in Australia) at the star, and listen in for a sort of buzz that indicates not alien radio signals, but a sort of hum of alien technology.

It could be a power station or some other kind of structure. Or it could, in fact, be comets or asteroids. It could even be an observational error or an unexplained hypothesis not addressed by Yale or Berkeley SETI. But if it ends up Berkeley SETI is onto something, this could be the smoking gun that we're not alone in the universe, after decades of searching in vain.

http://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a17769/seti-light-blips/
« Last Edit: October 15, 2015, 03:28:26 am by astr0144 »

Offline WarToad

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #1 on: October 15, 2015, 08:35:01 am »
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/10/15/the-strange-star-that-has-serious-scientists-talking-about-an-alien-megastructure/

Quote
The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure

“It was kind of unbelievable that it was real data,” said Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian. “We were scratching our heads. For any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it.”

She was talking to the New Scientist about KIC 8462852, a distant star with a very unusual flickering habit. Something was making the star dim drastically every few years, and she wasn’t sure what.

Boyajian wrote up a paper on possible explanations for the star’s bizarre behavior, which was published recently in the Monthly Notes of the Royals Astronomical Society. But she also sent her data to fellow astronomer Jason Wright, a Penn State University researcher who helped developed a protocol for seeking signs of unearthly civilization, wondering what he would make of it.

To Wright, it looked like the kind of star he and his colleagues had been waiting for. If none of the ordinary reasons for the star’s flux quite seemed to fit, perhaps an extraordinary one was in order.

Aliens.
Or, to be more specific, something built by aliens — a “swarm of megastructures,” as he told the Atlantic, likely outfitted with solar panels to collect energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright said. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

To be sure, both Boyajian and Wright believe the possibility of alien megastructures around KIC 8462852 is very, very remote. It’s worthy of hypothesis, Wright told Slate, “but we should also approach it skeptically.”

Yet compared to the vast majority of supposed sightings of signs of extraterrestrial life, this one has some credibility. Here’s why.

KIC 8462852 was discovered through Planet Hunters, a citizen science program launched at Yale University in 2010. Using data from the Kepler Space Telescope, volunteers sift through records of brightness levels from roughly 150,000 stars beyond our solar system.

Ordinarily, planet hunters are looking for the telltale drops in brightness that happen when a planet crosses in front of its sun. That’s how we identify planets now — brief interruptions in the progress of light as it makes its way toward Earth. Not a presence, but an absence. Already the project has uncovered a few confirmed planets and at least several dozen more planet candidates.

But one finding from the program was unlike anything else scientists had ever seen. Volunteers marked it out as unusual in 2011, right after the program started: a star whose light curves seemed to dip tremendously at irregular intervals. At one point, about 800 days into the survey, the star’s brightness dropped by 15 percent. Later, around day 1,500, it dropped by a shocking 22 percent. Whatever was causing the dips, it could not have been a planet — even a Jupiter-sized planet, the biggest in our solar system, would only dim this star by 1 percent as it transited across, Slate reported. (The Kepler telescope was badly damaged in 2013, so the researchers don’t have data from more recent dips, if there were any).

Another natural force must be at work here.

In their paper, Boyajian and her colleagues went to great lengths to review and refute the more obvious explanations for the odd display. It wasn’t a mistake, caused by a problem the telescope or their data processors — they checked their data with the Kepler mission team, and found no problems for nearby stars when they checked their light curves against neighboring sources.

It wasn’t the star’s fault either. Some young stars, still in the process of accumulating mass, will be surrounded by a whirl of orbiting dust and rock and gas that can blur or block their light. But this star wasn’t young, Boyajian found. Nor did it look like other kinds of stars that demonstrate this light variability.

Something must be blocking the star’s light from the outside, the paper concluded — maybe catastrophic crashes in the asteroid belt, maybe a giant collision in the planetary system that spewed debris into the solar system, maybe small proto-planets shrouded in a Pig-Pen-like cloud of dust. But every explanation was lacking in some way, with the exception of one: Perhaps a family of comets orbiting KIC 8462852 had been disturbed by the passage of another nearby star. That would have sent chunks of ice and rock flying inward, explaining both the dips and their irregularity.

It would be “an extraordinary coincidence,” as the Atlantic put it, for that to have happened at exactly the right moment for humans to catch it on a telescope that’s only been aloft since 2009. “That’s a narrow band of time, cosmically speaking.”

Then again, KIC 8462852 itself is extraordinary. Of the 150,000 or so stars within view of the Kepler Telescope, it is the only one to flicker and dim in this unusual way.

Boyajian’s paper only looks at “natural” explanations for the phenomenon, she told the Atlantic. But she’s open to looking at unnatural ones, which is where Wright and his “swarm of megastructures” theory come in.

Scientists — at least, the ones who like to theorize about these things — have long said that an advanced alien civilization would be marked by its ability to harness the energy from its sun (rather than scrabbling over its planet’s resources like us puny earthlings). They envision something like a Dyson Sphere, a hypothetical megastructure first proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson that would orbit or even encompass a star, capturing its power and putting it to use.

Obviously, a Dyson sphere has never been spotted in real life, though they’re all over science fiction. But if one were to exist, it wouldn’t look like a metal ball around the sun — it would probably comprise a chain of smaller satellites or space habitats, something that would block its star’s light as weirdly and irregularly as the light of KIC 8462852 has been blocked. That’s why researchers who are interested in finding alien life are so excited about the finding.

Boyajian, Wright and Andrew Siemion, the director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, are now working on getting access to the massive radio dishes they can point at the star in search of the kinds of radio waves usually emitted by technology.

If they find them — well, that would be very big and very, very unlikely news.

Of course, the star in question is about 1,481 light-years away from Earth — meaning that even if aliens did create a giant solar panel complex out there, they did so in the 6th century, while we were emptying chamber pots out of second story windows and fighting off the first bubonic plague pandemic.

Quite a bit has changed on Earth since then. Who knows what could have happened around KIC 8462852?

Interesting.  Mainstream scientists open to the idea.
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Offline rdunk

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #2 on: October 15, 2015, 02:06:16 pm »
Hey WT, good post, but I thought you would want to know that this interesting subject was posted a little earlier today by astro144 (see link below). The go-to link is the same too. Don't know that there is any reason to merge either, since there are no replies on either yet. (Of course, I can't merge or delete anyway :) )

Happens to all of us, that post!!  :)

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/forum/index.php?topic=8761.msg119212;topicseen#new

Offline WarToad

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #3 on: October 15, 2015, 05:58:08 pm »
Ahhhh... sorry.  I was looking through new posts and obviously missed that.  My Bad.

Admins - Feel free to merge or delete.  No worries.
Time is the fire in which we burn.

Offline astr0144

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #4 on: October 16, 2015, 07:38:37 pm »
Why it’s so hard for astronomers to discuss the possibility of alien life


The internet went crazy this week over a strange star observed by NASA's Kepler spacecraft.

Also linked to Wartoads post.

http://www.thelivingmoon.com/forum/index.php?topic=8762.msg119216;topicseen#new

   
The internet has been abuzz this week over the possibility of intelligent alien life somewhere in our galaxy. This time, an article published by The Atlantic set off the storm. The story details how NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has spotted a strange star in the Milky Way named KIC 8462852. The star exhibits weird fluctuations in its brightness, leading a few astronomers to propose — among many other ideas — that maybe a swarm of alien megastructures is orbiting around the object.

"I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University who studied the star, 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." Wright said he is working on a paper that explores the theory further.

"ALIENS SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE VERY LAST HYPOTHESIS YOU CONSIDER."

It's perhaps the least likely scenario to explain the star's behavior, but since the story's publication, there have been numerous articles suggesting that NASA has found complex alien life around KIC 8462852. "Astronomers believe bizarre light patterns from a star millions of miles away to be alien megastructures" offered one article, and another claimed: "Astronomers think they have found an alien megastructure." The headlines are completely ridiculous and misleading, according to astronomer Sara Seager.

"It’s just irresponsible reporting. Because if you take a look at the paper — the scientific paper the authors wrote — [that idea] is not really even in there," Seager, astronomer and planetary scientist at MIT, told The Verge.

Seager noted this has long been a problem for astronomy. Whenever astronomers talk about potential evidence for alien life, their statements are often overblown. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the field, she said, because discussing how to find extraterrestrial beings is an important part of exoplanet science. "We definitely visit that question a lot: How will we know? What evidence does it take?" she said.

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The internet has been abuzz this week over the possibility of intelligent alien life somewhere in our galaxy. This time, an article published by The Atlantic set off the storm. The story details how NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has spotted a strange star in the Milky Way named KIC 8462852. The star exhibits weird fluctuations in its brightness, leading a few astronomers to propose — among many other ideas — that maybe a swarm of alien megastructures is orbiting around the object.

"I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University who studied the star, 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." Wright said he is working on a paper that explores the theory further.

"ALIENS SHOULD ALWAYS BE THE VERY LAST HYPOTHESIS YOU CONSIDER."

It's perhaps the least likely scenario to explain the star's behavior, but since the story's publication, there have been numerous articles suggesting that NASA has found complex alien life around KIC 8462852. "Astronomers believe bizarre light patterns from a star millions of miles away to be alien megastructures" offered one article, and another claimed: "Astronomers think they have found an alien megastructure." The headlines are completely ridiculous and misleading, according to astronomer Sara Seager.

"It’s just irresponsible reporting. Because if you take a look at the paper — the scientific paper the authors wrote — [that idea] is not really even in there," Seager, astronomer and planetary scientist at MIT, told The Verge.

Seager noted this has long been a problem for astronomy. Whenever astronomers talk about potential evidence for alien life, their statements are often overblown. It’s an unfortunate byproduct of the field, she said, because discussing how to find extraterrestrial beings is an important part of exoplanet science. "We definitely visit that question a lot: How will we know? What evidence does it take?" she said.

 


Artist rendering of NASA's Kepler spacecraft. (NASA)

Planetary scientists are always looking for signs that extraterrestrial beings may exist on planets elsewhere in the Universe. For example, finding gases on a planet that wouldn't normally belong there may indicate the presence of single-celled organisms. There are also discussions among researchers about how to spot intelligent life, too; perhaps they would try to communicate with us, possibly by constructing a big signal of some kind that our telescopes could see. "Think about people who are lost in the woods," said Seager. "They start a fire or show something very reflective. There are papers written about it: what would the aliens have to do to get our attention?"

No concrete evidence has ever been found to support the existence of alien life, but scientists still need guidance for the best places to look. The bizarre qualities of KIC 8462852, first described in a paper published by a Yale group called Planet Hunters, are what gave Wright the idea that this star could be a good target. The Planet Hunters' paper discusses how this object, observed by the Kepler spacecraft, differs from other stars with orbiting planets. Normally, when planets pass in front of their host star, they temporarily dim the star's light by a minuscule amount. This dip in brightness is often observed in patterns, indicating the planet's uniform path around the star.

SCIENTISTS STILL NEED GUIDANCE FOR THE BEST PLACES TO LOOK FOR ALIEN LIFE

KIC 8462852 also dips in brightness, but in a much more abnormal way; its brightness will dip by as much as 20 percent for irregular periods of time — anywhere between five to 80 days. That means something very large is passing around the star in a non-uniform pattern.

The Planet Hunters' study offers many different scenarios that could explain the abnormal light dipping. The main theory centers on a large group of comets that have been pulled in by the star's gravity. However, Wright, who helped the Planet Hunters group with their paper, told The Atlantic that he is working on an additional report to suggest that an alternative, unnatural scenario might be occurring. Wright explained later in a blog post that he has been working on a theory about how Kepler might be able to detect "planet-sized megastructures — solar panels, ring worlds, telescopes, beacons, whatever" that are orbiting planets. If they were large enough, they'd cause the huge light dips like the ones seen on KIC 8462852.

"One of the things that occurred to me is that a civilization that would build one megastructure would eventually build more. The star might be surrounded by them (a Dyson swarm)," wrote Wright in his blog post.

Wright goes on to say that he isn't claiming that's what's going on here, and suggesting otherwise is "overstating the evidence." However, when it comes to the SETI Institute — the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — scientists need to focus on the "best targets." The Universe is a big place, so researchers are always looking for ways to narrow their search. Pointing our antennas at KIC 8462852 would be a better strategy than analyzing the many other millions of stars we know about.

"SOMETHING'S GOING IN FRONT OF THE STAR, BUT WE DON'T KNOW WHAT."

But in regards to the frenzy surrounding this particular star, Seager said that jumping to the alien conclusion is way too premature. Inexplicable stars like KIC 8462852 are observed all the time in astronomy. "It's correct that this star seems to be anomalous and unique in all of the Kepler star data, but there are other one-off objects like this in astronomy," said Seager. "Not all puzzles are solved right away. Something's going in front of the star, but we don't know what."

NASA also cautions not to get too enthusiastic, since Wright's paper on the alien theory hasn't even been published yet. "The paper, as far as I know is not yet accepted," said Dr. Steve Howell, a Kepler project scientist at NASA Ames Research Center. "We have this belief in the scientific community that until a paper is accepted, what’s said there and the results may change, so I think until this gets accepted we should scientifically be cautious. That’s kind of how things work."

Until that happens, Seager said speculating any further is just silly. "We love media attention; it's great for the field. But I just find this a little awkward."


http://www.theverge.com/2015/10/16/9553033/kepler-alien-megastructure-dyson-sphere-kic-8462852


                      =======================

We spoke with some of the astronomers who discovered the 'alien' megastructure to find out if it's fact or fiction


And while some are saying that this star could be harboring a giant structure built by an advanced alien civilization, the scientists behind the hype are saying otherwise.

Business Insider recently spoke with two of these astronomers to find out what's really going on and if this structure really is proof of alien intelligence or a complete hoax.

For some background: A postdoctoral graduate at Yale, Tabby Boyajian, and Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, recently discovered a bizarre and mysteriously giant structure orbiting the star that's unlike anything they've ever seen.

And now they're doing what scientists do best: weighing all of the possible explanations until more data comes in that can rule out the wrong reasons in favor of the right one.

Right now, there are many options on the table, including a giant swarm of comets, left-over chunks from a broken-up planet, and last but certainly not least an alien-built megastructure. But we won't know for sure until more data is collected.

Is it aliens?

As Penn State astronomer Kimberly Cartier told Business Insider about the coverage: "It's gotten a bit out of hand." What's more, she said that the probability of this exciting, yet wildly confusing, observation being aliens is "very low."

She also emphasized: "Just to clarify, neither [my colleague] Jason [Wright] or myself ... are advocating that it is an alien megastructure, but we also can't completely rule it out."




View gallery
.Aliens
(Shutterstock/Albert Ziganshin)
Cartier works with Wright who is spearheading the search for these megastructures as a way to enhance the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) project. The two collaborated on a scientific paper about how to go about finding these structures back in 2009.
Moreover, Wright recently blogged about his work with KIC 8462852.

His post does an excellent job of presenting the data in a straight-forward, non-hyped way. But as he recently told Atlantic reporter Ross Andersen, "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."

We asked Wright how he felt about the hype his quote has since spawned.

"I think the star is really inexplicable, but I would put the probability that [aliens] is what it is as very low."

What's really going on

Right now, the only scientific information astronomers have for star KIC 8462852 is its light curves, which is an estimate of how much light Earth receives from the star over a given period of time.


View gallery
.Arecibo_Observatory_Aerial_View
(Uploaded to Wikipedia by File Upload Bot (Magnus Manske))
The Arecibo Radio Telescope began collecting data for SETI in 1999.

These light curves reveal that something giant, about half the width of the star, is blocking the light but in bizarre bursts that are anything but periodic. If the obstruction were a planet eclipsing the star, it would block the light with a predictable pattern as the planet orbited the star.
But "the eclipses have very strange shapes in the sense that whatever is blocking it is not a circular object," Wright told Business Insider. "And there's lots of them — lots of things blocking the star. When you put all that together, there's nothing like that [anywhere else] in the sky. It's unique and very very strange."

These light curves were first collected by a post doctoral fellow at Yale, Tabby Boyajian. After Boyajian presented them at Penn State, Wright took an immediate interest and soon after contacted Andrew Siemion, who works at the Berkeley SETI Research Center. The two submitted a telescope proposal to study the star in more detail that is still pending.

What wright would like to do next is take what are called spectra of the star. Spectra are a critical tool in astronomy that allows researchers to essentially take a chemical fingerprint of an object that tells them what it's made of.

"I want to see spectra when its dim and spectra when its bright and compare the two," Wright said. "And the difference should tell us what the light is passing through and tell us whatever is blocking it, what that's made of. That will be very diagnostic."

Is Earth doomed?

In the mean time, as we wait for Wright and Siemion to collect more information, it is worth addressing the possibility that if (and that's a very big if) this structure were made by an alien civilization, is Earth doomed?


View gallery
.Asteroid
(Shutterstock)
To that, Cartier said absolutely not.
If the structure were artificial, it would be what Cartier and Wright describe as a Dyson sphere, which is a type of energy generating device and was first described by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in a 1960 paper in Science.

"The structure itself is not meant to support life, Cartier told Business Insider. "It's something called a Dyson sphere, which is essentially a large porous series of solar panels ... that's meant to capture some of the starlight and convert it into usable energy for a civilization that's orbiting farther out in a region that would be more habitable."

While constructing a Dyson sphere would require a tremendous amount of resources, it does not take technology that is vastly advanced to our own to build. That means, these potential alien beings have not likely invented warp drives to skip across the galaxy just yet.

"Certainly to build a structure that big requires a lot more resources and potentially more advanced technology than we currently have available to us," Cartier told Business Insider. "However that doesn't imply that they have the capabilities to travel all the way here to Earth."

The star KIC 8462852 is over 1,400 light years from Earth. So, don't worry, the world won't be coming to an end due to an alien invasion any time soon.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/heres-astronomers-saying-alien-space-180209741.html

other articles..

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/has-a-telescope-just-spotted-a--power-station--built-by-aliens--075441785.html#5buodSZ

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/are-experts-really-searching-for-alien-megastructures-in-space/


« Last Edit: October 16, 2015, 09:32:11 pm by astr0144 »

Offline rdunk

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #5 on: October 17, 2015, 09:54:31 am »
A thousand guess as to what is causing this star to go blink blink with its light still might not yield the right answer. I am open to most anything, but I do strongly doubt that alien mega-structures  is the right answer!! :)

One small point to the thoughts of this article: Quote -  "Astronomers believe bizarre light patterns from a star millions of miles away to be alien megastructures.................

Well, it is not just millions of miles, nor is it billions of miles, nor is it trillions of miles, but rather it is "quadrillions" of miles away from Earth - 8,880 quadrillion miles, on the basis of it being 1,480 light years away (at 6 trillion miles prox per light year) :)

Another consideration on what we think we know about this "mega-structure" would make this whole alien scenario seem probably a pretty pathetic possibility - it is so huge!!! In a statement I found in WarToad's post, this mega-structure would have to be 22 times larger than our planet Jupiter, to affect the star's light to the extent that is seen.

To quote: "But one finding from the program was unlike anything else scientists had ever seen. Volunteers marked it out as unusual in 2011, right after the program started: a star whose light curves seemed to dip tremendously at irregular intervals. At one point, about 800 days into the survey, the star’s brightness dropped by 15 percent. Later, around day 1,500, it dropped by a shocking 22 percent. Whatever was causing the dips, it could not have been a planet — even a Jupiter-sized planet, the biggest in our solar system, would only dim this star by 1 percent as it transited across, Slate reported. (The Kepler telescope was badly damaged in 2013, so the researchers don’t have data from more recent dips, if there were any).

Another natural force must be at work here".
:)

Yes, the extent of possible alien (if any) capability remains unknown, but the build of some thing(s) 22 times the size of Jupiter would seem a bit farcical, doncha thinkl! :)
« Last Edit: October 17, 2015, 10:12:27 am by rdunk »

Offline rdunk

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #6 on: October 17, 2015, 01:41:54 pm »
The number in my reply above should be "8.880" quadrillion miles.................  :o :)

Offline Abracadabra

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #7 on: October 18, 2015, 01:38:06 pm »
Hi everyone,
Ok with an estimation of about 30 sextillion of stars in our universe
( source from scienceenviro ) it is 30x10 and add 21 zero after
I just can t visualize how our universe is huge and still an expension.
This megastructure ( corps celeste ) if it s an alien megastructure
or not can fit easily in our universe scale.
However year after year Im not surprise with that kind of discovery
Especially that they are here and around since..................???  ::)

Offline ArMaP

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #8 on: October 18, 2015, 02:22:29 pm »
I think we shouldn't forget the possibility that the star doesn't have any thing blocking the light but it's the star itself that has changes in brightness, like giant Sun spots.

Offline astr0144

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #9 on: October 20, 2015, 06:45:40 am »
I agree that it seems very hard to try to comprehand the possibilities behind this with regards to the scale of the distances involved as well as the possible size of such a structure and our technology to suggest that we have detected such a thing.

In more recent years they have indicted discovering Planets passing in front of stars as that Stars planets rotate around it in its Solar System. and generally I think we would think that the planets are of a fair size in comparison..

I am not knowledgeable enough to know just how powerful our Radio or other Telescopes or detectors maybe..and to what scale it could detect an object in size relative to its distance.

I know we are increasing in this capability all the time as progress has always been the case..

If we took an eg of Matter and say using our Microscopes to try to detect structure that Matter is made up off..from Molecules to  Atoms and then the finer parts of Atoms.... we have been able to observer smaller and smaller particles or whatever the Matter or Atoms is made up of.

Can Our Telescopes act in a similar way when observing our Universe and looking at Star Systems and Galaxies ?

Just how far have we been able to go I wonder and can we continue to observe in such fine detail to detect such possible structures...if they exist..

I think we envision that there may be a point we cannot go beyond... and your egs may seem to suggest this..

Another thought is what if our Solar System is just like that of an Atom within a minor  particle within the Universe and our Planet is like an electron.. and we were at such a scale in relation to other Solar Systems.... Only being at certain scales of Size can living Conscious beings envision scale relative to with certain sizes...

Or like the Russian Doll effect... where there is a smaller Doll with the previous larger one and so on... the scale just keeps altering..

But what do I know !  :)




Quote
Well, it is not just millions of miles, nor is it billions of miles, nor is it trillions of miles, but rather it is "quadrillions" of miles away from Earth - 8,880 quadrillion miles, on the basis of it being 1,480 light years away (at 6 trillion miles prox per light year) :)

Another consideration on what we think we know about this "mega-structure" would make this whole alien scenario seem probably a pretty pathetic possibility - it is so huge!!! In a statement I found in WarToad's post, this mega-structure would have to be 22 times larger than our planet Jupiter, to affect the star's light to the extent that is seen.
« Last Edit: October 20, 2015, 06:53:06 am by astr0144 »

Offline astr0144

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #10 on: October 20, 2015, 11:35:09 pm »
What Are the Odds of an Alien Megastructure Blocking Light From a Distant Star?


A strange star located 1,500 light-years from Earth is exhibiting strange flickering behavior that’s leading some scientists to speculate that an alien megastructure is blocking the light. But what would such a structure be exactly and how likely is it that the Kepler space telescope has actually spotted one?




Right now the star KIC 8462852 is really hot – and not just because it is a F-type star – but because the Kepler space telescope has discovered that it flickers in a highly unusual way, as if something is obscuring it. These dips in the light are different to what you would expect from planets blocking the star.

Scientists are failing to come up with an explanation for the phenomenon based on natural astrophysical processes, so attention has turned to the potential of an alien megastructure blocking the light. But what would such a structure be exactly and how likely is it that Kepler has spotted one?

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Many Possibilities

It is true that dips in the light from the star are odd, both in shape and timing. They are unlikely to be caused by a surrounding cloud of dust, as the star is too old to have such a planet-forming disk. But what about a storm of comets? They are actually not very good at obscuring stars, so it is not all that likely either. Fragments from a planetary collision might work, except that such events are so rare that we would not expect to see any with Kepler.

The lack of a simple explanation has made a lot of people quietly (or not so quietly) ask whether this could be an alien megastructure, known as a Dyson sphere.

What Are the Odds of an Alien Megastructure Blocking Light From a Distant Star?
23

Concept of a Dyson sphere. Kevin Gill/Flickr, CC BY-SA
The Dyson sphere was first described by Freeman Dyson in the 1960s, who argued that a technologically advanced alien civilisation would use more and more energy as it grew. As the biggest source of energy in any solar system is the star at its centre, it would make sense that the civilisation would build orbiting solar panels to try to capture it. Such structures would take up more and more space until they eventually covered the entire star like a sphere. However, a complete sphere would be invisible to Kepler as it would absorb all of the light from the star, so signs of this would have to come from something currently under construction.

Could this be the case? I doubt it. My basic argument is this: if a civilisation builds a Dyson sphere, the sphere is unlikely to remain small for a long period of time. Just as planetary collisions are so rare that we should not expect to see any with Kepler, the time it takes to make a Dyson sphere is also very short: seeing it during construction is very unlikely. Even if we knew a Dyson sphere would eventually be built in a solar system the chance of actually witnessing it happening is low.

How do we know this? To build a Dyson sphere, one would need to disassemble a nearby body, like a planet, to provide the material for the solar captors. In a recent paper written with a colleague, we calculated that disassembling Mercury to make a partial Dyson shell could be done in 31 years. One way of doing this would be to mechanically disassemble the planet, much like we do in our aluminium and steel industries. From these industries, we know a lot already about the energy cost of such work, so the trick is to use already mined material to build more mining equipment and solar collectors to power it, achieving an exponential feedback loop.

The time it would take to disassemble any terrestrial planets is not much longer than for Mercury, while the gas giants would take a few centuries. Our aim in the paper was to show that using a small fraction of the resources in the solar system it is possible to harness enough energy to launch a massive space colonisation effort (literally reaching every reachable galaxy, eventually each solar system), but the important point is that this kind of planetary engineering is fast on astronomical timescales.

What Are the Odds of an Alien Megastructure Blocking Light From a Distant Star?




Image showing the region Kepler can see, where the mysterious star is located. NASA

Over the history of an F5 star like KIC 8462852, even 1,000 years to build a sphere is not much. Given the estimated mass of the star as 1.46 solar masses, it will have a lifespan of 4.1 billion years. The chance of seeing it while being englobed by a Dyson sphere is one in 4.1m.

This is the probability assuming there will eventually be a sphere. Presumably only a few stars would have aliens and will be hidden this way, so the actual probability of seeing one in the process is much lower. Of the 150,000 stars Kepler watches we should not expect any of them to be in this state.

Junk Planet or Laid-back Aliens

Another possibility is that the structure is an abandoned, unmaintained Dyson shell. Such a structure would likely start gravitationally clumping together into streams of wreckage, which makes this sound like a promising explanation – at first. But the timescale of coalescing into a junk planet is likely faster than natural planetary formation timescales (100,000 to a few million years) since the fragments involved would be in nearly identical orbits from the start. So the probability that we are looking at Dyson remains is still low.

But it is indeed several orders of magnitude more likely for us to see the decay of the shell than its construction. Like normal ruins, these often hang around far longer than the time it took to build the original structure.

What about if the aliens were building the sphere extremely slowly? This is in a sense what we are doing here on Earth (disassembling it to a tiny extent) by launching satellites one by one. So if an alien civilisation wanted to grow at a leisurely rate or just needed a bit of Dyson shell they could of course do it.

However, if you need something like 30 quintillion Watts (which could correspond to a 100,000km collector at 1 astronomical unit around the star) your demands are not modest. Dyson originally proposed the concept based on the observation that human energy needs were growing exponentially, and this was the logical endpoint. Even at 1% growth rate a civilisation quickly – in a few millennia – need most of the star’s energy.

In order to get a reasonably high probability of seeing an incomplete shell we need to assume growth rates that are exceedingly small. While it is not impossible, it seems rather unlikely given how life and societies tend to grow.

Other Alien Structures?

Dyson shells are not the only megastructures that could cause intriguing transits. Research has suggested that an alien civilisation could, for example, sort asteroid material using light pressure, engineer climate using shades or mirrors, or travel using solar sails. Most of these tools are small compared to stars, but Kepler might notice them if there were enough of them.

Another study has calculated the possibility of detecting stellar engines – gigantic mirror arrays for moving entire solar systems – based on light curves. But unfortunately the calculated curves do not fit KIC 8462852 as far as I can tell.

In the end, we need more data. The stakes are high. If there is no intelligent life in space it means either that we are very lucky – or that intelligent species die out fast. But if there is (or was) another technological civilisation it would be immensely reassuring: we would know intelligent life can survive for at least some sizeable time.

But in truth, I think we will instead learn that the ordinary processes of astrophysics can produce weird transit curves, perhaps due to strange objects (remember when we thought hot Jupiters were exotic?). The universe is full of strange things, which makes me happy I live in it. But it makes sense to watch the star, just in case.



http://gizmodo.com/what-are-the-odds-of-an-alien-megastructure-blocking-li-1737529525

Offline zorgon

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #11 on: October 21, 2015, 12:27:26 pm »
[youtube]AIS7My2Tsnw[/youtube]



[youtube]Lt6qxbQWDdM[/youtube]





Offline zorgon

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #12 on: October 21, 2015, 12:28:16 pm »

Offline astr0144

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #13 on: October 24, 2015, 06:28:05 am »
Scientists are days from finding out if that mysterious star could actually harbor aliens.

Like the Rotating see thru Cube "Z". 8)

Seems that the Astronomers / Scientists are now pointing other telescopes towards the mystery star and are suggesting that they may know in days if it could have E.T technology passing in front of it. ???

Can we believe what they may tell us !



When astronomer Doug Vakoch heard the news that there might be an alien civilization around the mysterious star KIC 8462852, he took immediate action.
For the last week, Vakoch and his colleagues at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute have been pointing the ground-based Allen Telescope Array in California at the enigmatic star with one goal in mind.

"We're trying to rule out the hypothesis that maybe it's intelligence out there," Vakoch told Business Insider.

He added that they're crunching the data in real-time and will, therefore, know if it's ET within the next week, or so.

Last week, news broke that a bizarre collection of objects unlike anything astronomers have seen before is in orbit around star KIC 8462852. And until more data comes in, speculation is raging that it could be a megastructure in the process of construction by an advanced alien civilization — though astronomers have told Business Insider that the chances of that are "very low."

"Our assumption is that there's going to be a natural explanation for this, we just haven't gotten clever enough to find it," Vakoch told Business Insider.

Vakoch is the director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute with a special interest in how to design outgoing messages that would express what it's like to be human.

For now, though, Vakoch has all his attention on the Allen Telescope Array (ATA) and what it will find — if anything — around KIC 8462852.

The ATA is a radio telescope that can tune in to 9 billion different frequencies between 1 and 10 GigaHertz. What Vakoch is searching for is a strong signal at a specific frequency, which will tell him that something, or someone, is transmitting from the star's system.

Since the big news, Vakoch and his team are the first to explore this star for potential alien habitation. However, because the ATA observes in radio frequencies, that's about all they can do. They can't, for example, determine the composition of this mysterious material to determine what it is, which is what Penn State astronomer Jason Wright hopes to do in the coming months.

Still, Vakoch's task is of utmost importance and far from easy.




"We're trying to rule out the hypothesis that maybe it's intelligence out there," Vakoch told Business Insider.
 
"We're looking for a signal at one spot on the radio dial, and the problem is we don't know which spot" he told Business Insider. "And so we tune the dial to billions of different channels. It's almost like we're searching the cosmic cable TV but instead of trying to find intelligence on 400 or 500 channels, we're looking at billions of channels."
Complicating matters further are the space satellites and radio transmitters on Earth that send signals in the same frequency range the ATA is listening to. So, to make sure any signals they detect are from aliens and not Earthlings, the SETI scientists tune the telescope to three separate stars at the exact same time.

"What we want to find is a signal coming from one of those stars and not from the other two," Vakoch said. "What we typically find is that if there's a satellite flying over it's in our telescope and it's going to look like we're getting that signal at all three of those stars, and then we know it's a false alarm."

When astronomers tune ATA to a specific object, all 42 antennae move to a specific point in the sky:


.
Out of most SETI instruments, the ATA is perfect for this exercise, Vakoch said. That's because it enables the scientists to crunch the data in real-time — something not many other SETI instrument can do — so if they hear an intriguing signal, they'll focus in to learn more.
Vakoch expects that observations will end Friday, Oct. 23 at which point they'll immediately begin writing up their results and put them through the coveted peer-review process that is the backbone of any reputable scientific discovery.

More importantly, this means that if the scientists have found something, then they already know. But they won't be saying anything for at least a few weeks.

"So you can expect it to be several weeks or months until you here the conclusions of our observations, even though we may be wrapping them up in the next week or so," Vakoch said.

Is it aliens? Vakoch suspects not.

"I think the best explanation I've seen so far is ... a swarm of comets," he said. However, if the researchers do discover something it will be huge.

"If we find what we're looking for it will tell us one of two things: Either we have found an extraterrestrial that is sending us a signal that's very similar to our own radio technology, or we have discovered a radically new natural phenomenon that makes this star system even freakier than it is right now."

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/scientists-days-finding-mysterious-star-144600271.html
« Last Edit: October 24, 2015, 06:41:30 am by astr0144 »

Offline astr0144

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Re: Alien technology possibly spotted orbiting a distant star.
« Reply #14 on: November 09, 2015, 02:53:47 pm »
Professor Brian Cox Suggests 'Aliens' Could Use KIC Star System To Power Their Civilisation.


Brian Cox has theorised that "an advanced alien civilisation" could be responsible for the bizarre behaviour of the KIC star that sent the internet into meltdown a few weeks ago.

In an interview with BBC Radio 6’s breakfast show, he used the Dyson sphere theory to explain why it would not be "horrendously surprising" to think that the star might be powering another civilisation.

Experts from the SETI Institute have also shed light on the star's behaviour, explaining, via a statement, that it is "quite likely due to nature and not aliens."




"It is a thing called the Dyson sphere, which is where an ultra-advanced civilisation basically surrounds their whole star in a sphere of solar panels, which would get every last bit of energy from the star, so they could build their big space-faring interstellar civilisation," Professor Cox told BBC Radio 6.


"I emphasise, it probably isn’t solar panels, but it’s data that isn’t explained at the moment and it wouldn’t be horrendously surprising if it turned out there was an advanced alien civilisation there that was way ahead of us and had built some big solar panels. I wouldn’t go “that’s impossible”, it isn’t."

However, SETI Institute experts studying the star system published data ruling out aliens as the reason behind the odd light dimming patterns.

Using the Allen Telescope Array, scientists looked for two different types of signals narrow-band and broad-band.

The narrow-band signals are the most frequently sought after in SETI experiments, while broad-band signals could indicated whether "astro-engineering projects" are taking place near the star, SETI Institute stated.

“The history of astronomy tells us that every time we thought we had found a phenomenon due to the activities of extraterrestrials, we were wrong,” said Seth Shostak, an astronomer for the Institute.

“But although it’s quite likely that this star’s strange behavior is due to nature, not aliens, it’s only prudent to check such things out.”



http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/11/09/professor-brian-cox-suggests-aliens-could-use-kic-star-system-to-power-their-civilisation_n_8508634.html?NCID=edlinkukhpmg00000182&ref=yfp
« Last Edit: November 09, 2015, 03:15:00 pm by astr0144 »

 


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