Time has an article by Jeffrey Kluger about aliens, maybe:
It doesn't take much for people to start seeing aliens but, in this case, they're looking in the wrong direction.Rico says space continues to be weirder than we can imagine...
You know what’s a lot less interesting than telling people there’s an advanced alien civilization fifteen hundred light years from Earth that has built a cluster of massive satellites orbiting their parent star? Telling people that there’s not an advanced alien civilization fifteen hundred light years from Earth that has built a cluster of massive satellites orbiting their parent star.
So, which idea do you think has gotten more buzz in the past few days?
In case you haven’t been paying attention to the advanced alien civilization beat, word has been swirling in a number of publications, including The Atlantic, The Washington Post, Newscientist, and the sober Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, that there is something strange going on around the star known as KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus.
Since 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been staring fixedly at a small patch of the Milky Way that contains about 150,000 stars. What Kepler is looking for is what is known as occultation, or the periodic dimming and brightening of light coming from the stars. If the flickering happens at predictable intervals, the odds are it is caused by an orbiting planet, or exoplanet, as the ones orbiting other suns are known. The degree of the dimming can also provide clues about the exoplanet’s volume. So far Kepler has discovered more than four thousand worlds or candidate worlds this way.
But KIC 8462852’s dimming is unusual. The light flickers, but irregularly and at different intensities, almost as if the star is being orbited not by an exoplanet or orderly procession of exoplanets, but by a mass of debris of different sizes, speeds and orbital inclinations.
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