An unusual star has been discovered in our galaxy that flickers as if someone is playing with the switch. This strange behavior has puzzled scientists and raised an intriguing possibility: could it be a sign of extraterrestrial life?
On April 29, Chris Lintott, professor of astrophysics at the University of Oxford, said during a lecture at Gresham College in London spoke about the Boyajian star in the constellation Cygnus, also known as Tabby’s star. In recent years, space probes and observatories have closely studied its unpredictable dimming and brightness.
“The behavior of this star is extraordinary,” Lintott said. “The brightness decreases sharply and then increases in rapid, erratic jumps. It follows no pattern and is the only one of its kind in our galaxy.”
When Boyajian’s unusual behavior was first discovered in 2012, the Kepler space observatory studied the star in detail. These measurements showed that a huge amount of material periodically blocks the star’s light and tightly surrounds it.
Theories about the strange star included asteroid clusters, dust rings and disintegrating comets. What has received the most attention, however, is a suggestion from scientists at Penn State University that the obscuring mass could be a massive alien megastructure known as a Dyson sphere.
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960. It is an artificial shell around the star that collects most or all of its energy.
The concept of a Dyson sphere is based on the assumption that a sufficiently advanced civilization could build a massive structure that would absorb a star’s energy and use it for its needs. The shell can be made from different materials, such as metals, carbon nanotubes or even living organisms.
“These distant civilizations could be powered by enormous rotating structures that astronomers have called Dyson spheres or swarms,” Lintott said.
They found that different wavelengths of light were blocked to different degrees, Lintott said. This indicates that starlight is passing through the dust cloud. Boyajian’s obscuring mass is most likely a dust cloud resulting from the collision and subsequent destruction of the planet.
However, Lintott also noted that the strange object analysis is important because it highlights techniques that will become more important in the coming years as efforts to identify extraterrestrial civilizations increase.
