Alien Megastructure

I couldn't resist commenting on this. This concept is based on a discovery by NASA's Kepler Space Telescope. Kepler discovers planets orbiting distant stars by measuring a slight dimming effect as the planet moves (transits) across the star. By careful measurements the size of the planet can be estimated.

A star KIC 8462852 exhibited a very strange light curve. What was different is that the cycling of the light dip from the star was not regular.  A normal planet wouldn't do that. In this special case the cycling was as much as a 20% dip. That would suggest a very large planet, so large as to be impossible.

Subsequent studies indicated that the dips came in clumps as well as single large dips. The only way that this could happen is if the planet was 20 times larger than Jupiter.

That's impossible. A Jupiter like planet would become a star if it were that large. Since the star in question is an F-type star, which is 1.5 times the size of our sun, it would be unlikely to be changing its luminosity like that.

There are other possibilities, such as large comet tail passing across the star or a large clump of debris from a collision, but these would be rare and unlikely.

The advanced alien idea was considered because of the massive size of the object. One possibility is a Dyson sphere, a humongous structure that would surround the star in order to collect its energy. It would be like a large mesh structure that would have a radius of over 90 million miles.

The fact that the brightness of the star is irregularly changing might indicate that this massive structure is being constructed. If it is it would indicate that an intelligent alien society has advanced way beyond us.

One method to discover what is causing this luminosity change is to measure the star's brightness changes in different wavelengths.
Right now the only thing that we can say about this is the fact that no intelligent signals are being sent to us from this star system, which makes it more unlikely that it's an alien civilization.

Hold the fort! It appears that there is more than one of these fluctuating stars. The Kepler Space Telescope found a star in 2014, EPIC 204278916, that is the same size as our sun but only half its mass. Astronomers report that this star dims by as much as 65%. Some theories to explain this include a swarm of comets around the star. The other is that the KIC star rotates so fast it has an oblate form in which the pole are hotter and brighter than the equator. The third theory is the alien Dyson sphere surrounding the star.

The latest theory is that the star is surrounded by a dust disk that is 'edge on' to us on Earth. Since the EPIC is on ten million years old, this theory would make sense. The KIC star is hundreds of millions of years old. However, it could still have a dust disc orbiting it.

Thanks for reading.