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HughPickens.com writes:

Beginning in 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope began looking at approximately 150,000 stars for signs of objects orbiting with some recognizable pattern in an attempt to find exo-planets. Now Ross Anderson writes in The Atlantic that scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look at KIC 8462852, a star that undergoes irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20% level that can last for between 5 and 80 days.

"We'd never seen anything like this star," says Tabetha Boyajian. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out." Dips in the light emitted by stars are often shadows cast by transiting planets especially when they repeat, periodically, as you'd expect if they were caused by orbiting objects. Boyajian, a Yale Postdoc who oversees Planet Hunters, recently published a paper describing KIC 8462852's bizarre light pattern and explores a number of scenarios that might explain the pattern—instrument defects; the shrapnel from an asteroid belt pileup; an impact of planetary scale, like the one that created our moon.

SETI researchers have long suggested that we might be able to detect distant extraterrestrial civilizations, by looking for enormous technological artifacts orbiting other stars. Jason Wright says the unusual star's light pattern is consistent with a "swarm of megastructures," perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star. "When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," says Wright. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build." Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion on a proposal to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.

If they see a sizable amount of radio waves, they'll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may be able to say whether the radio waves were emitted by a technological source, like those that waft out into the universe from Earth's network of radio stations. "In the meantime, Boyajian, Siemion, Wright, the citizen scientists, and the rest of us, will have to content ourselves with longing looks at the sky," says Anderson, "where maybe, just maybe, someone is looking back, and seeing the sun dim ever so slightly, every 365 days."

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