Remember back a few weeks ago when the Kepler spacecraft discovered an alien megastructure that had people convinced that we’d finally discovered extraterrestrial life? We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but scientists monitoring the oddity have found no signs of intelligent life.
According to Gizmodo and CNN reports, citizen scientists reviewing Kepler data originally discovered the anomaly—an unusual pattern of flickering lights—around a system identified as KIC 8462852 or Tabby’s Star. While many stars dim at regular intervals due to the transiting of orbiting planets, the behavior of KIC 8462852 was something different.
For one thing, it did not dim at regular intervals, and when it did, its light output decreased by up to 20 percent. Its unusual behavior led Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright to suggest that it might be occluded by an alien megastructure of some kind, possibly an array of giant solar panels built to collect light from the star (also known as a Dyson swarm).
In a recent study, Wright called Tabby’s Star, “the most promising stellar SETI target discovered to date,” and over the past couple of weeks, SETI Institute scientists monitored the area using the Allen Telescope Array. But late last week, they reported that their search had been fruitless.
Radio signal search comes up empty, but observations to continue
The ATA, a radio telescope array located in California’s Cascade Mountains, consists of several small antenna used units used to monitor wavelengths, according to CNN and Gizmodo. The SETI team used it to monitor the supposed megastructure for two different types of radio signals, each of which is believed to be a possible indicator of advanced technology.
The first, known as narrow-band signals, theoretically emit a signal that an alien culture would use to announce their presence to the rest of the universe. The second, called broadband signals, would likely be present if there KIC 8462852 was actually home to an extraterrestrial structure. Thus far, SETI astronomers have yet to find either signal, they told CNN on Sunday.
“This is the first time we’ve used the Allen Telescope Array to look for relatively wide-band signals, a type of emission that is generally not considered in SETI searches,” SETI Institute scientist Gerry Harp said in a statement. While the results thus far have not been promising, he and his colleagues noted that they plan to continue their observations of Tabby’s Star.
“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,” SETI astronomer Seth Shostak added. “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.”
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Feature Image: SETI Institute
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