Kepler's 'Bizarre' Signal Sparks Alien Intelligence Speculation

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An illustration suggests what an exoplanet may look like orbiting a star.
Credit: ESA
The fascinating speculation surrounding a recent Kepler observation of a star 1,500 light-years away has reignited questions of alien life in our universe and what it means for future studies.
ANALYSIS: Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure?
First I really want to emphasize, as I did in my previous blog about KIC 8462852, that the root cause of a very strange Kepler transit signal is most likely due to natural phenomena. (A transit occurs when an exoplanet — or, in this case, something else — drifts in front of its star and Kepler detects a slight dimming of starlight.) After analyzing the unique transit signal identified as being "bizarre" by the Planet Hunters community, researchers did a thorough job identifying a possible mechanism by which significant and distinct dimming events could have been triggered.


Among the likely natural causes of the star brightness dimming outlined in a paper submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society and made available on the arXiv preprint service on Sept. 11, astronomers looked into debris from a possible planetary collision, the presence of circumstellar rings, starspots, and a clump of comets. All possibilities were investigated, but all were unsatisfactory, except for the latter.
The comet clump explanation seems to answer many of the mysteries about the strange transit signal. A nearby star, only 1,000 AU from KIC 8462852, could have caused some gravitational perturbations during close approach, possibly sending a swarm of comets toward the star, blotting out up to 22 percent of the star's light from Kepler's view.
13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens
The exocomet explanation seems reasonable. Although exocomets have been detected around other stars in the past, this would be the first detection of a vast clump of comets big enough to significantly dim the light of a mature F-type star (around 50 percent larger than our sun).
However, an observation of this kind would have to be an incredible stroke of luck; for us to have a NASA space telescope looking in the right place at the right time of this rare collection of comets to pass in front of one star of only 150,000 stars in Kepler's field of view (over a very short time period of 4 years), is crazy lucky.
But just because it's a serendipitous observation doesn't mean it's not caused by comets; we were just really, really lucky to see it.

Wait, There's More

It is a great piece of research that stands by itself, an outstanding discovery first by citizen scientists poring over publicly-available data and confirmed by an international collaboration of professional astronomers.
But then, on Tuesday, an article appeared in The Atlantic; an article that provided a further look into the scientific process of seeking out more extreme possibilities. Once again, for the commenters who were upset at my blogging about these alternate hypotheses, I am in no way concluding that the transit signal observed from KIC 8462852 isn't caused by comets or some other natural phenomenon that we haven't accounted for. I'm exploring a possible avenue of investigation that the astronomers involved in the original research are exploring themselves.
GALLERY: How Aliens Can Find Us (and Vice Versa)
Post-doctorate researcher Tabetha Boyajian, at Yale University and lead author of the original paper, spoke with The Atlantic's Ross Andersen, mentioning that she was currently considering "other scenarios" for the strange transit pattern. And, after sharing the data with Penn State University astronomer Jason Wright, who is planning a follow-up publication, one of those other scenarios came to light: the strange transit signal from KIC 8462852 might be caused by a huge artificial structure.

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