Aliens Building a Dyson Sphere? Where's the Flux?

www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-tech/astro...20151014-gk9iwj.html

Kepler has found a star that has up to 20% of its light occasionally blocked. And it doesn't fit the usual pattern of a planet blocking the light.

The paper detailing the findings (complete with lightcurves) is at arxiv.org/abs/1509.03622 . The authors go through possible causes for the lightcurves and suggested that a possible explanation is the passage of a family of exocomet fragments.

Another paper yesterday however looks beyond possible natural phenomena arxiv.org/abs/1510.04606 . In this paper the authors speculate about other causes for the light curves. They give a good summary of what we'd expect from natural phenomena and what we'd expect from an artificial massive constructs. And while they note the need to be careful to not fall into an 'aliens in the gaps' fallacy, they conclude that this would make a good SETI target.

KIC 8462852 shows transit signatures consistent with a swarm of artificial objects, and we strongly encourage intense SETI efforts on it, in addition to conventional astronomical efforts to find more such objects (since, if it is natural, it is both very interesting in its own right and unlikely to be unique). Since the Kepler data archive presumably contains many poorly studied stars that may exhibit these signatures, the alien megastructure rate remains poorly constrained.

IMO this is up there with the 'Wow!' and 'LGM-1' signals. Guess I'll need to add a slide or two about aliens to my (well, Dr. Mullays!) Kepler talk now!

Cheers,
~Al

Just read through it. Very interesting. Thanks for the link Al

Sean

A major problem with any serious seti search is "where do you search"?.
Well, now they have a target.

If there was a load of comets flying about, and you wanted to vacuum them up, what could be better than a Dyson?

Hi,

There's an AAVSO alert out now to hopefully keep tabs on whatever is going on with this star.

www.aavso.org/aavso-alert-notice-532