Signs of alien life? Mysterious star stirs controversy

Mysterious light on a distant star could be a sign of alien civilisation, some astronomers have claimed, stirring controversy among their peers. Not so fast, said NASA. A paper recently authored by Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral student at Yale University, and several citizen scientists, described the planet as having a unusual light pattern, and suggested that it appeared to have matter circling it. The paper was published in October in a British journal called the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” Boyajian was quoted as saying in The Atlantic magazine. “It was really weird.”

It does not look like a normal exoplanet or binary star light curve. However, I think that saying that it immediately is alien is a bit of a stretch.

Steve Howell, a US space agency scientist working on the Kepler space telescope’s planet-hunting mission.

Kepler observes distant planets and stars by observing transits, or the dimming of light when another celestial body passes in front. The light from this strange world was seen to dim from 15 to 22 percent at irregular intervals. A planet could not be the cause, because even if it were the size of Jupiter – the largest planet in our solar system – the light from the star would dim only about one percent when it passed in between the star and the telescope. Boyajian’s paper explored various natural scenarios, including defects with the Kepler space telescope, an asteroid pile-up or an impact that created a sea of comet debris. But another astronomer, Jason Wright, Penn State University, is preparing his own paper that interprets the light pattern as being the sign of an extraterrestrial civilization.

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