Something New

Aliens or Not, We've Still Got A Lot To Learn From NASA's Kepler Mission

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Maddie Stone

Filed to: ASTRONOMY10/17/15 1:00pm

This week, the internet worked itself into a frenzy over the possibility that we’ve found an alien megastructure. But whether or not there’s a Dyson sphere buried in the Kepler data, the discovery of a strange, flickering star is very interesting.

Indeed, it points to an entirely new use for the spectral data on 150,000-odd stars that NASA’s Kepler mission spent four years acquiring: Finding and studying really weird astronomical phenomena.

Aliens?!

If you missed the latest alien hysteria, here’s the gist: A thousand light years from Earth in the direction of the Cygnus constellation, a star known as KIC 846285 is behaving in an extraordinary manner. The star flashes and fades, light a lightbulb on a dimmer switch. On several occasions during our four years observing it, its light output dipped by over 20%.

It doesn’t look at all like the planetary transit events Kepler was built to detect — these will cause a star to dim periodically, by about 1% at most. As far as astronomers can tell, there’s nothing else like KIC 846285 in the Kepler database.

Dips in KIC 846285’s brightness over a 1500 day observational period. The bottom two panels are blown-up versions of the top one centered around day 800 and 1500. Image via Boyajian et al.

In a paper released on arXiv, a research team led by Tabby Boyajian proposes a number of natural explanations for the star’s light signature, including giant sunspots, epic clouds of cosmic dust, and a massive collision between two planet-sized objects. All of these scenarios are problematic for one reason or another. The most likely story is that a “family of exocomet fragments” were swept into orbit around KIC 8462582 when another star zipped close by.

Then there’s the unnatural explanation: Aliens. As astronomer Jason Wright explains in a forthcoming paper, KIC 8462852’s light pattern...