Unusual Star KIC 8462852 Likely Swarmed by Exocomets, Astronomers Say

Or was it a family of exocomets breaking apart?

The light was registered in irregular and unnatural flickering patterns, and one university researcher said it could be due to an alien superstructure sitting in front of the star to harvest solar power.

Other cited causes included fragments of planets and asteroids.

So that leaves comets as the most likely culprit. They report their findings in a paper recently published online by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

New infrared readings show that the popular explanation of a cloud of asteroid debris blocking the star does not appear to be the case.

“We may not know yet what’s going on around this star”, Marengo added.

In order to explain the unusual occultation pattern, astronomers assert that an enormous lead comet could have been responsible for the original dimming of light detected in 2011, while the 2013 event was the result of a swarm of lesser comets following in the giant’s wake. Kepler had observed it in visible light. The small bits of rock left behind by such a collision tend to radiate at infrared frequencies.

At first, researchers tried to look for infrared light using NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and found none. Unfortunately, WISE observed the star before the odd variations were seen and therefore before any putative dust-busting collisions. The scientists didn’t really think that our space telescopes had caught sight of an “alien megastructure,” but there’s no harm in hoping. As the cloud moved away, the brightness of the star was restored. The comets likely came in from a steep orbit that briefly dimmed the star. A massive comet leads the pack and could have blocked the star’s light in 2011.

This illustration shows KIC 8462852 behind a shattered comet.

According to the team, more observations are needed to help settle the case of KIC 8462852.

When the Iowa State astronomers studied the star with Spitzer infrared data from January 2015 – two years after the Kepler measurements – Marengo said they didn’t see much.

“But that’s what makes it so interesting”.

“So the destruction of a family of comets near the star is the most likely explanation for the mysterious dimming”, Dr Marengo said. Jason Wright, astronomer at Penn State University claimed that is something we could expect a developed alien civilization to build.

Spitzer couldn’t find any excess signs of infrared light coming off the warm dust, leading the scientists to believe the unusual light patterns were probably caused by cold comets – a family of them traveling in a weird, long orbit around the star.

In the end, the LGM-1 signals turned out to be a natural phenomenon.

“We didn’t look for that”, Marengo said. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. operates the flight system with support from the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder.