For more than 50 years, we’ve been scanning the skies with king-size antennas, hoping to pick up a radio signal from space that would prove the existence of other technically adept beings. So far, our efforts have found only senseless static – it’s been a long fishing expedition without so much as a nibble.
However, today there are people who believe that someone is tugging on the line. They suggest that the peculiar behavior of a nondescript star 8,000 trillion miles away could be tipping us off to a massive alien construction project.
That’s an exciting prospect, and not entirely fanciful. After all, tens of billions of biology-friendly planets speckle our galaxy. Surely at least some of those worlds house intelligent beings. If not, then Earth is a miracle, an explanation of last resort for science.
The star in question bears the unsentimental name, KIC 8462852, although is more colloquially know as Tabby’s star in a nod to the Yale University astronomer, Tabetha Boyajian, who led the team that discovered its strange behavior. Tabby’s star was observed by Nasa’s Kepler space telescope, and– thanks largely to the work of astronomy enthusiasts – was found to be a very erratic light source.
Over the course of days, this star can dim by more than 20%, something that ordinary stars never do. Then it will brighten, followed by a relapse of darkening weeks or months later. The amount of dimming is variable, and doesn’t occur with the regular cadence that would mark the presence of an orbiting planet.
When this odd behavior was first recognized, several possible explanations were offered by Boyajian’s team. The most favored was the presence of large clouds of dust from disintegrated comets around Tabby’s star. The orbiting detritus would occasionally mask its light.
But a more intriguing explanation was also proffered: perhaps this star shelters a planet boasting a civilization older and more technically adept than our own. And perhaps these advanced beings have embarked on a massive engineering project, building phalanxes of orbiting solar panels to supply the energy needs of their society. This space-borne construction could cause the dimming.
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