Have We Detected Megastructures Built By Aliens Around A Distant Star?

Popular Science ^ | October 14, 2015 | Sarah Fecht

[Krosan]

The Kepler space telescope's job is to find faraway planets that could potentially support life. But as The Atlantic reports, scientists are exploring the possibility that the telescope may have detected something even more exciting.

[...]

When a planet passes in front of a star, the star dims only for a few hours or days, and on a regular basis-- every 365 days, for example. But, at irregular intervals, the star KIC 8462852 darkens by as much as 20 percent, and it stays dark for anywhere between 5 and 80 days.

What could cause the weird light fluctuations? The researchers who discovered the behavior call it "bizarre."

In a recent paper, researchers have ruled out the possibility of faulty data or telescope jostling. Something appears to be blocking out the light, but it's not a planet, and the star is too old to be surrounded by the rings of debris that tend to circle around younger stars. Neither do the scientists think it could be caused by a recent collision.

That leaves just a few hypotheses. One is a cloud of comets that got pulled into orbit by a migrating star--if the comets are breaking up as they revolve around the star, that could cause the irregular pattern of dimming. The paper notes that this is the most promising explanation.

There is one other hypothesis, however.

“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider," Penn State astronomer Jason Wright told The Atlantic, "but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

[camle]

ok here goes. the circumfrence of earth’s orbit is 940,000,000km when you find the volume of a ring that long, 50,000km wide, and 100 meters deep, you come up with 47e14 cubic meters. versus 1.08e12 volume of the earth.

somewhere one of us made a mistake.

your calculations also assume that 100% of the material on earth would be useful...

[Svartalfiar]

The revolving shadow square ring is supposed to produce a regular series of days and nights for those living inside the ring world.

The spinning of the ring is also to simulate gravity, via the outward centrifugal force. The outward force will 'pin' people's feet to the inside perimeter wall.

Not quite - it's not an 'also'. The spinning of the inside ring is to simulate the day/night cycle. No one really lives there. The spinning of the outer circle is the one that spins for gravity.

[Krosan]

I used 1.083×10^21 m^3 for the volume of Earth as this is what I got from Wolfram Alpha.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=volume+of+earth+in+cubic+meters

[HeadOn]

In other news, scientists have discovered a very high-flying species of Asian bottle-flies that tend to congregate on glass lenses.

Film at 11:00.

[TChad]

really? someone’s been reading too many bad scifi novels....

Larry Niven's "Ringworld" won the 1971 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 1971 Hugo Award for Best Novel, and the 1971 Locus Award for Best Novel.

We might not understand aliens' motives for constructing megastructures, and we certainly don't understand the technology that would make it possible. However, we do know that smart cultures sometimes do very stupid things.