Sorry, E.T. lovers, but the results of a new study make it far less likely that KIC 8462852, popularly known as Tabby’s star, is the home of industrious aliens who are gradually enclosing it in a vast shell called a Dyson sphere.
Public interest in the star, which sits about 1,480 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, began last fall when Yale astronomer Tabetha (Tabby) Boyajian and colleagues posted a paper on an astronomy preprint server reporting that “planet hunters” – a citizen science group formed to search data from the Kepler space telescope for evidence of exoplanets – had found unusual fluctuations in the light coming from the otherwise ordinary F-type star (slightly larger and hotter than the sun).
Media interest went viral last October when a group of astronomers from Pennsylvania State University released a preprint that cited KIC 8462852’s “bizarre light curve” as “consistent with” a swarm of alien-constructed megastructures.
Read the full story at ResearchNews@Vanderbilt