The Star That Broke Every Rule

Actually, the most baffling discovery in modern astronomy did not come from a supercomputer, but from everyday people staring at their home monitors. The year is 2015. A Yale astronomer named Tabetha Boyajian is looking at data flagged by the Planet Hunters project, completely unable to process what she is seeing.

A distant star in the Cygnus constellation was flickering. But the star, later named Tabby’s Star, was not just dimming a little bit. It was losing up to 22 percent of its brightness at entirely random intervals.

To put that in perspective, if a planet the size of Jupiter passed in front of our sun, it would block exactly one percent of the light. Whatever was orbiting Tabby’s Star was mind-bogglingly huge. It had to be at least twenty-two times larger than the biggest planets in our universe.

Honestly, I had to re-read the original research paper three times before I believed those numbers. Stars just do not behave like this. Planets are round, so they create a very specific, symmetrical dip in light when they pass by.

The light dips from Tabby’s Star were jagged, uneven, and totally chaotic. Something utterly massive and completely irregular was blocking the light. And it was happening 1,470 light-years away from Earth.

The Alien Megastructure Hypothesis

When the data first went public, NASA scientists were stumped. They ruled out a faulty telescope immediately. The Kepler Space Telescope was working perfectly.

They ruled out a massive dust cloud, because dust absorbs heat and glows in infrared light. Tabby’s Star showed absolutely zero excess infrared radiation. The star was completely cold in the infrared spectrum.

That is when the whispers started. If it was not a planet, and it was not dust, what could block that much light without giving off heat?

A highly advanced alien civilization building a Dyson Sphere.

You have probably heard of Dyson Spheres in science fiction. They are theoretical megastructures built around a star to harvest its energy. A massive, incomplete swarm of solar panels would perfectly explain the jagged, 22-percent drops in starlight.

For a brief window, some of the most brilliant minds on the planet seriously considered that we had found an alien construction site. The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence even pointed their massive radio dishes straight at Cygnus. They listened for a radio signal, a hum, or any sign of life.

They heard nothing. Just the silent, terrifying void of deep space.

A Cosmic Demolition Derby

If aliens were not building a power plant, what was going on? The scientific community had to get creative. They started looking for natural, albeit incredibly rare, explanations.

One leading theory suggested a massive swarm of exocomets. Imagine hundreds of huge comets, dragged into the inner solar system by a passing star. As they got close to Tabby’s Star, they would break apart and create massive, irregular tails of gas and debris.

Another terrifying idea involved planetary destruction. What if two massive planets collided, blasting jagged chunks of rock and ice into orbit? The debris field from a shattered world could theoretically block 22 percent of a star’s light.

But both of these theories have holes. Comet swarms that massive are statistically improbable. And a planetary collision would create a massive amount of dust, which we already know would glow in infrared light.

The Mystery Deepens

To make matters worse, astronomers started looking at historical data from the late 1800s. They found old photographic plates from Harvard University that showed Tabby’s Star.

When they analyzed those century-old glass plates, they found something impossible. Tabby’s Star had been slowly fading for over a hundred years. No comet swarm or planetary collision can explain a century-long, slow-motion dimming.

Today, we are still watching KIC 8462852. New telescopes are coming online, and we are gathering more data every single day. Some scientists now suspect a highly unusual type of magnetic dust could be the culprit, but nobody knows for sure.

We are looking at a shadow cast across the universe, completely unable to see what is casting it. If it is not a shattered planet, and it is not a swarm of comets, what exactly is lurking in the dark around Tabby’s Star?