'Alien Megastructure' Star is Not Swarmed by Comets: Another Reason for Its Strange Signal

The "alien megastructure" star may have gotten a little more mysterious. While scientists hypothesized that a meteor swarm may have caused the strange signal coming from the star, a new study shows that a swarm wouldn't be able to explain the pattern of light.

Researchers are currently in the process of studying the star system KIC 8462852, which is also known as Tabby's star. This is because an online astronomy crowdsourcing site, called Planet Hunter, discovered an unusual light fluctuation in the star system a few years ago. Since they, scientists have tried to hypothesize what might cause this strange signal.

The best explanation at the time was that a huge mass of comets has been erratically orbiting the system and spreading enough dust to dim the light up to 22 percent. The new study, though, examined the last 100 years of the star's history and found that the hypothesis was implausible. But could it be an alien megastructure?

"I don't know how the dimming affects the megastructure hypothesis, except that it would seem to exclude a lot of natural explanations, including comets," said Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, who helped come up with the megastructure hypothesis, in an interview with New Scientist. "It could be there were just more dimming events in the past, or that astronomers were less lucky in the past and caught more dimming events in the 1980s than in the 1900s. But that seems unlikely."

Scientists are still unsure what's causing the dimming, but something is certainly responsible. It may take a few more observations, though, before researchers can say definitively what it is.

The findings are published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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