Astronomers have launched a $ 100 million project to study the unusual gradation of a star suspected of being sucked in by aliens.
The team of scientists working on a $ 100 million project called the Breakthrough Initiative has started studying KIC8462852, also known as the Tabby Star, an unusually darkened star 1,500 light years from Earth, according to the ‘International Business Times.
In the project, the Green Bank radio telescope in West Virginia, US, monitored the Tabby Star for 8 hours every night for two months starting October 26. The research was funded by British physics professor Stephen Hawking, Facebook group chairman MarkZuckerbeg, and Russian billionaire YuriMilner.
Tabby Star owes its name to Professor Tabetha Boyajian of the University of Louisiana in the United States, the astronomer who discovered the star, located in the constellation Cygnus. It is a star that has an unusual gradation phenomenon that science cannot explain.
One theory of the star’s sudden decrease in brightness is a meteor shower. Usually, when a planet or meteor moves in front of a star, the light emitted by the star decreases 1-2% of the time. However, the Tabby Star has a decrease in brightness of up to 22% and lasts for several days at a time. Some studies even show that the star faded over the course of a century, proving that the hypothesis of a meteor shower is ruled out.
In the second hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) scientists believe that an extraterrestrial civilization could have built a giant orb called the Dyson Structure around the moon star to absorb its energy.
The Breakthrough Initiative team points out that no previous study has detected abnormal signals from the star. “The Green Bank Telescope is the largest and most sensitive navigational radio telescope on the planet capable of observing Tabby,” said AndrewSiemion, project manager.
“We connected a new SETI instrument to the telescope to simultaneously examine multiple radio frequency bands and billions of channels, so that we can quickly explore radio spectra,” Siemion said.
According to DanWerthimer, senior scientist at SETI, the chances of finding a Dyson structure are very low. “I think it’s only about one in a billion, but we’ll check it out,” Werthimer said.
