[Gusto Brunt]

Since its discovery two years ago, a star that resides around 1,300 light years from Earth has gained a reputation as the most bizarre in the galaxy. Named KIC 8462852, the star gained worldwide attention when scientists suggested its weird behaviour could be explained by the presence of a huge shield built by an advanced alien civilization.

Back then Tabetha Boyajian, from Louisiana State University, and her colleagues discovered that KIC 8462852 exhibited huge dips in its brightness at regular intervals using data from the Kepler Space Telescope—sometimes by as much as 20 percent.

The brightness of a star normally dips when an object, such as a planet, passes in front of it. But even a gas giant like Jupiter—the biggest planet in our solar system—would only block around two percent of the light from our sun. A planet would also only cause light at certain times because of its orbit, which means whatever is causing the dimming at KIC 8462852 must be absolutely massive—and cannot be travelling along a normal orbit.



https://www.yahoo.com/news/solving-m...160134422.html