KIC 8462852 Star Anomaly Gets ET Experts' Attention

(CNN)The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute has its eyes -- and soon possibly
one of the United States' premier telescopes -- focused on an anomaly that some astronomers
can't quite explain.
Users on the online astronomy crowdsourcing interface Planet Hunters discovered a peculiar
light pattern between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations a few years ago. The group uses
publicly available data gathered by NASA's Kepler Telescope, which has been tasked with
finding Earth-like planets by searching for the periodic dimming of stars that might suggest
such a planet is passing by.
After a number of users noticed the peculiarity, it was sent to the group's advisory science
team, which includes Yale postdoctoral astronomy fellow Tabetha Boyajian.
"It did definitely spark some lively discussions on the talk boards. We scrolled through the
discussion boards and superusers, and they let us know that there's something we should be
watching out for," Boyajian says.
"What was unusual about that was the depth of the light dips, up to 20% decrease in light,
and the timescales (of light variation) -- a week to a couple of months."
So what's the explanation? Could it be from a swarm of comets? Some sort of intergalactic
phenomenon that Earthbound scientists haven't discovered? Or an effect of planet-sized
structures built by some sort of alien civilization?
Jason Wright, a Penn State astronomy professor, saw Boyajian's data and can't quite explain
it. But in a post Thursday to his website, he cautioned against jumping to conclusions -- as
some apparently have -- that intelligent beings far away are behind this oddity.
"My philosophy of SETI," Wright wrote, referring to the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence, "is that you should reserve your alien hypothesis as a last resort." He also cited
"Cochran's Commandment to planet hunters ... : Thou shalt not embarrass thyself and they
colleagues by claiming false planets.

"It would be such a big deal if true, it's important that you be absolutely sure before claiming
you've detected something, lest everybody lose credibility," the astronomer added. "Much
more so for SETI."
Comet swarm or sign of alien intelligence?
The star, identified by researchers as KIC 8462852 -- though Wright calls it "Tabby's star"
and his team labels it the "WTF star" after the subtitle to Boyajian's paper, "Where's the
flux?" -- is roughly 1,465 light-years from Earth, or about 8.6 quadrillion miles.
Along with a group of colleagues, Boyajian published an academic paper last month about
the star and concluded that the light peculiarities could have been the result of comet
fragments.
This is "a plausible but contrived natural explanation," according to Wright.
"I would put low odds on that being the right answer," the Penn State astronomer said. "But
it's by far the best one I've seen so far (and much more likely than aliens, I'd say)."
Boyajian herself stressed "the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system,"
which is why she and her cohorts took the paper to Andrew Siemion, the head of the
University of California-Berkeley's SETI Group. They wanted answers, and they said topnotch telescopes were needed to get them.
"At first I thought they were absolutely nuts; it wasn't until they told me their data had been
vetted by the Kepler team at NASA," Siemion said.
The California-based astronomer, who's been working on the search for extraterrestrial
intelligence for about 10 years, called the findings "very atypical."
"This is one of maybe only two or three times we've been contacted by an astronomer who
says there's something we don't understand," he said. "It is a very strange object."
The search for ET has been going on for years. What do we know?
Request put in to use radio telescope

Siemion submitted a series of proposals to use telescopes -- including the Green Bank
Telescope in West Virginia, which the National Radio Astronomy Observatory calls the
premier single-dish radio telescope -- to look deeper into the anomaly.
The following reading is adapted from CNN.com with terms and conditions applied.