National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientists using the Kepler Telescope say that a star, KIC 8462852, has an unusual behavior that could indicate alien life.
The Telegraph reports that the star, located 1,500 light years away, has its lights dipped by more than 20 percent and at random intervals, which indicates it is not a planet, says NASA astronomer Dr. Stuart Clark. If it is a planet, it would cause a dim in light by one or two percent only.
According to Discovery News, Kepler discovers an exoplanet by sensing the very slight drop in starlight from a star. When the telescope detects a slight diming of the starlight, it creates a lightcurve from where much information could be found such as the physical size of the transiting exoplanet as well as deduce its shape.
Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University believes the star's different pattern could be caused by a group of comets, although she is also considering other scenarios since Keppler has observed the star for four years. She says the different pattern could be bad data or movement of the spacecraft but they eventually ruled it out.
Penn State University Jason Wright agrees with Boyajian and says the pattern could be due to a swarm of megastructures in orbit. He adds, "Aliens should be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build."
He and Boyajian are working together to investigate the star more in a second research paper. The two want to know if radio waves from the star suggest technology activity. They expect to release the results of this study in 2016. They submitted the first paper to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society journal.
An online survey by the British daily says that 91 percent of its readers believe that alien life exists beyond the Earth.