SETI Searching for ‘Alien Megastructure’

Astronomers are determined to find intelligent aliens that are possibly living around the Tabby's star system. A $100-million project called the Breakthrough Listen initiative will hunt for signals that could possibly be produced by aliens, at least for the next ten years.

Space.com reported that scientists are set to begin studying Tabby's star with a 330-foot-wide Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia. This telescope is the largest fully-steerable radio telescope made - and is by far the largest, most sensitive telescope capable of looking at Tabby's star relative to its position in the sky.

Tabby's star, which is officially called the KIC 8462852 lies around 1,500 light-years from Earth, and was studied by NASA's Kepler space telescope. During the observation period, the star was seen dimming dramatically several times, at one point at a whopping 22 percent. The occasional brightness dips are said to be far too significant to be caused merely by an orbiting planet - possibly an "alien megastructure" of an enormous collection of solar panels.

Of course, there are also other likely scenarios considered, such as a cloud of comet fragments that could block the star's light, or some unknown structure in the space between our own planet and Tabby's star.

Breakthrough Listen co-director Andrew Siemion, who also happens to direct the Berkeley Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Research Center at the University of California Berkeley said in a statement that "The Green Bank Telescope is the largest fully steerable radio telescope on the planet, and it's the largest, most sensitive telescope that's capable of looking at Tabby's star given its position in the sky."

He shared that they were able to deploy a new instrument that connects to the telescope and can look at many gigahertz of bandwidth simultaneously, and many different radio channels at the same time so they can explore the radio spectrum faster. These observations are going to take place for eight hours a night for three nights in the next two months, the first to take place on October 26^th.