The Weirdest Star in the Galaxy

Between two constellations in the sky, there's an old star that we cannot see with a naked eye.  It lies between the constellations of "Cygnus the swan" and Lyra "the harp".  Now where it sits, there normally isn't a lot going on in terms of other stars, events in the galaxy, or really anything.  In addition, this is one of the many stars that the Kepler Space Telescope (which has been viewing this star for the past 4 years) has been watching to view tiny dips in the light emitted by this star, indicating that a planet had transitioned in front of this star.  However, over the past couple of years, one particular star has been emitting some strange light patterns.  Not necessarily one dip of light, or two.  Or ten.  Or a hundred.  In fact, it would seem that this star has in its orbit a massive collection of objects, constantly circling the star.  Now this pattern is completely normal for a young star, as it would have dust and debris spinning around the star while it is forming.  There's just one problem about this situation.

The star under question, is an old mature star, not a young one.

And no other star viewed by the Kepler Space Telescope, out of the 150,000 stars viewed, has experienced the same event.

This amount of material orbiting around the star is large enough to block out numerous photons that the telescope could see, meaning they aren't small objects at all.  And what's more interesting, is that if nature just blindly set the mass around the star, it would have consolidated by now.  Unless this is a recent event, gravity normally would have condensed the material by pulling it into the star.  Since the materials are there, and this is a mature star, something doesn't add up. 

Scientists have been trying to come up with theories and explanations as to why this is happening, or what is causing this event.  One theory, for example, is that the debris could be the remains of comets dragged into that star's area by another star that came exceptionally close, according to researchers.  Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, has been working recently on this extraordinary event.  Wright and his co-authors say the unusual star’s light pattern is consistent with a “swarm of megastructures,” perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.  “When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright told me. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

Does this not sound like a completely bizarre circumstance?

Now I'm not saying aliens are real or are not real, we have no idea what is going on at this star.  The next step in this endeavor is to determine if any other signals are being emitted from the star or the objects, like a radio signal.  In fact, the researchers want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star around January, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.  If anything crazy or unknown happens, a follow-up would happen almost instantly on the event.  “If we saw something exciting, we could ask the director for special allotted time on the VLA,” Wright told me. “And in that case, we’d be asking to go on right away.”  For now, however, we are left to look at the stars and wonder what mystery awaits at this unusual star.

For more information, check out the story at this link:

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/10/the-most-interesting-star-in-our-galaxy/410023/