The Most Mysterious Star in Our Galaxy [View all]
"Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look. In the Northern hemisphere’s sky, hovering above the Milky Way, there are two constellations—Cygnus the swan, her wings outstretched in full flight, and Lyra, the harp that accompanied poetry in ancient Greece, from which we take our word “lyric.”
Between these constellations sits an unusual star, invisible to the naked eye, but visible to the Kepler Space Telescope, which stared at it for more than four years, beginning in 2009. “We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale.
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“It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.” In 2011, several citizen scientists flagged one particular star as “interesting” and “bizarre.” The star was emitting a light pattern that looked stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching. The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation."
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Who knows, eh? Wouldn't it be awesome if this turned out to be actual aliens?
= new reply since forum marked as read
