About a month ago, the internet was buzzing over the potential encounter of a number of alien mega structures belonging to an advanced alien civilization around a nearby star. A couple of weeks ago, scientists came up with an alternate solution that was more realistic. Now, crushing the hopes of alien enthusiasts around the world, SETI reports no signs of life around KIC 8462852.
- The SETI Institute was created by Frank Drake and Carl Sagan and stands for Search for extraterrestrial intelligence
- The Fermi Paradox is the contradiction between the high chance of alien life and our lack of evidence for it
- The Kepler Spacecraft was named after the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, was launched on March 7, 2009
- The Kepler program is meant to survey the Milky Way and discover planets in or near the habitable zone
The KIC 8462852 star was discovered about a month ago, and it was a stunning discovery for the astronomers who found it.
It presented fluctuations in its shine, suggestive of something massive passing between it and Earth at irregular intervals.
Scientists tried to come up with an explanation, but the irregularity of the dips in the star’s luminosity, as well as their intensity proved a lot harder to explain than initially believed. This led a number of astronomers to believe that the star was orbited by a series of alien mega structures that collected energy from it.
However, a more recent study presented a more reasonable explanation: that a family of comets was partially destroyed near the star, and that the fluctuations were caused by dust clouds passing near it.
Even though this sounded like the most reasonable explanation, there was no data to confirm it, so some people still believed in the presence of an alien civilization of at least type II on the Kardashev scale right in our galaxy.
Between October 29 and November 28, scientists at the Boquete Optical SETI Observatory in Panama tried to collect data that would result in potential life signs around the star. They tried to scan for any potential laser pulses that were aimed at Earth with the purpose of communication.
The Allen Telescope Array in California also scanned for a wide variety of radio waves coming from the star’s direction, and encountered nothing.
With two of Earth’s most advanced pieces of technology not being able to detect any life signs around KIC 8462852, the alien megastructure theory is rapidly falling apart.
However, alien enthusiast claim that the alien civilization might be advanced enough to use other means of communication than laser pulses and radio waves, so they’re still holding out hope that E.T. might be in our vicinity.
Image source: Wikimedia
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