Alien hunters are fixated on a mysterious star, which refuses to reveal its secrets

[kristopher]

4. That has already been ruled out...

Discovered by citizen scientists scouring data publicly available through the crowdsourced Planet Hunters effort, these dimming events kicked off a years-long effort by a team led by Tabetha Boyajian at Yale to figure out what was going on with the star. After working with NASA to rule out technical issues that might have caused the oddities, they scrutinized the star itself for evidence that it might be unusually young, as very young stars have disks of warm dust, gas, and rocks orbiting them that can create all sorts of strange behavior.

The star proved to be completely pedestrian: Not only does it appear to be mature and lack any disk of material, it showed no other signs of peculiarity, either. If not for the Kepler data, the star would attract no attention at all...

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/the-most-mysterious-star-in-our-galaxy/482397/


It isn't a large planet either.

It was the chart above that caught amateur astronomers’ attention. The chart shows data collected over 1,500 days of observation (showed on the x-axis). Each dip on the y-axis is a dimming event. Although these dips would normally indicate the presence of a planet, the weird thing about KIC 8462852’s dimming is how big it is. At its largest, it shows the star dimming by more than 22%, which is 10 times bigger than the dimming observed by a Jupiter-sized planet crossing a similar-sized star. Thus, it seems likely that the dimming wasn’t caused by a planet, but something else...