THE WEIRDEST STAR IN THE UNIVERSE

There are at least 100 billion stars in our galaxy, and some of them are pretty weird in appearance or behaviour. But only a limited number of natural processes are at work, so nature has a way of repeating itself. For a star to be uniquely weird, there would have to be something artificial about it – the product, not of nature, but of an alien civilisation. That’s not to say the star itself has to be artificial, just that our view of it is somehow altered as a consequence of alien technology. If we could find something like that, it would be the astronomical discovery of the millennium – and there are a couple of good candidates already.

Is it really possible that alien engineers could build an artificial structure around a star that’s so enormous it would affect the way the star looks to us? The first person to give serious consideration to such an alien megastructure was the British-born physicist Freeman Dyson, way back in 1960. He imagined that a super-advanced civilisation, rather than venturing into the depths of interstellar space, might choose to stay in its own planetary