This is the Best Explanation yet for that 'Alien Megastructure' 1,400 Light-Years Away

A mysterious star more than 1,400 light-years from Earth has absolutely baffled astrophysicists. It's so different than anything we've ever observed, researchers can't completely discount that it's sign of an alien civilization.
The star, called KIC 8462852, is so distant the only information we have about it comes from its light curves — the amount of light from the star that makes it back to Earth. Astrophysicists have noticed bizarre blobs about the star blocking out some of its light. The blobs don't appear to be planets since they follow a random pattern rather than an expected, planet-like orbit.

A giant swarm of comets or a broken-up planet might reason the odd phenomenon, but no particularly convincing astrophysical explanations have arose. That's why some consider the weird blobs might be a Dyson sphere — a massive group of solar panels orbiting a star to gather its energy — therefore implying that we may be observing a technological "megastructure" built by aliens.
As Penn State astrophysicist Kimberly Cartier told Business Insider, though, the media reporting has "gotten a bit out of hand." Tech Insider has spotted what we think is the best clarification yet for KIC 8462852, and it doesn't include aliens at all.
Jim Galasyn, a writer for the blog Desdemona Despair, saw a 2013 study paper posted by commenter "Michael" on a story from Centauri Dreams. That paper clarifies how some stars don't have a constant brightness level as they're unevenly shaped and "oblate" discs.

As the scientists write in that study:
When a star is oblate, it has a bigger radius at its equator than it does at its poles. As a consequence, the poles have a higher surface gravity, and thus higher temperature and brightness. Thus, the poles are "gravity brightened", and the equator "gravity darkened."
The star turns out to be oblate (and hence gravity darkening occurs) because the centrifugal force resulting from rotation creates additional outward pressure on the star.
This generates patches of darker and lighter areas within these kinds of stars, so the light curves that make it back to Earth won't look totally uniform. What's more, planets frequently orbit "obliquely" from Earth's perspective and do not pass directly in front of a star.
So those mainly weird light curves from KIC 8462852 could easily be produced by planets passing in front of darker and lighter areas — not alien artifacts floating around it. In the image from the research paper below, the red sphere signifies an oblate star, and the smaller circles demonstrate the path that a planet might take around the star. As the planet crosses into darker and lighter patches of the star, it creates the abnormal light curves that you can see below:

Barnes et al/The Astrophysical Journal

For comparison, here is a light curve from KIC 8462852:

T.S. Boyajian et al./arXiv.org

Light strength (left) and days of observation (bottom) show how KIC 8462852's light changes over time.
Our overlay of both graphics (below), stimulated by one of Galasyn's illustrations, isn't scientific. Though, it shows how an oblate star and planets orbiting it would better explain the light curves:

This appears like a more probable explanation than aliens, but just in case it's off, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, an organization that searches for signs of life outside Earth, is still carefully examining the star. Scientists there have been pointing the ground-based Allen Telescope Array in California at the bizarre star for the past several days. SETI scientist Doug Vakoch told Business Insider that we should know if it's aliens within the next week or so.

Article Originally Published on: Tech Insider[Edited for Text and Content]Author: Kelly Dickerso

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