Update October 19th 2015 – A friend from Facebook was kind enough to share a video with Michio Kaku emphatically stating his assertion that an advanced alien civilization built the objects described below. The video is below my commentary.
The following is a compilation of articles discussing the WTF 001 phenomenon. KIC 8462852 is the formal name for the star that is home to this peculiar discovery; some think may be an alien structure.
Exoplanet hunters use periodic dimming of a star’s light intensity to determine if it has small rocky planet’s orbiting it. Normally the dip in brightness is relatively small, but the objects discovered around KIC8462852 are so massive that it causes a dimming of up to 22%. Additionally, the dimming occurred as a result of several different transit objects, suggesting that it was not a single planet but perhaps a cluster of smaller objects. The team researching WTF 001 designated the initial observation as D800 and D1500 respectively, as described in the below excerpt:
“The D800 event appears to have been a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent, whereas D1500 was a burst of several transits, possibly indicating a clump of different objects, forcing a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. To cause such dips in brightness, these transiting objects must be huge.” – Discovery News
As the following series of articles detail, these observations were verified by several different groups, including the Kepler Team at NASA; but what they are remains a mystery.
While jumping to conclusions as to what these objects are is inadvisable and several teams have avoided the alien structure theory in favor of grouped comets or possibly planetary collision debris. None of these theories, including the alien structure notion, have any supportive evidence to back them, however, given the body of pre-existing research available, a natural explanation for the phenomenon has yet to materialize, leaving the door open for more open-minded interpretations.
At this stage, an alien structure theory has just as much validity as a natural one.
“This research paper focuses only on natural and known possible causes of the mystery transit events around KIC 8462852. A second paper is currently being drafted to investigate a completely different transit scenario that focuses around the possibility of a mega-engineering project created by an advanced alien civilization.” – Discovery News
Some scientists open to the alien structure theory assert that this may be evidence of a massive solar energy collection technology, similar to what Freeman Dyson posited in the mid 20th century. A Dyson Sphere is a theorized artificial structure created around a star at a distance that would allow it to receive the total amount of energy pouring out from the star, providing an enormous amount of energy to the civilization that built it.
As interesting as this theory is, it is based on a nuclear model of stellar activity, wherein a star’s output is primarily the result of stored fuel with no energy connections to the surrounding stars whatsoever. Electric Universe theorists would disagree however, because under this model a star is simply a focal point of energy predominantly fed by the surrounding universe at large via electromagnetic connections. ‘Cutting the star off’ from this cosmic web of energy by creating a Dyson Sphere would alter star’s activity and possibly make the whole undertaking untenable as the Dyson sphere alters the electrical potentials in the stellar system.
Related Electric Universe (Plasmology) Encoded in Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs
Related Cosmic Disclosure Episode 9: Electric Sun – Summary and Analysis | Corey Goode and David Wilcock
In my view, the Electric Universe model is much more accurate in explaining the interactions observed in the heavens, and the likelihood of Dyson Spheres, as described by modern science, is very low.
Regardless, if this discovery does end up being an example of extraterrestrial mega structures, then possibility the work of several secret space program whistleblowers will be taken more seriously. Corey Goode, David Wilcock and Steven Greer – to name a few – have stated that apparently an ultra secret arm of the military industrial complex has explored the solar system and found ancient structures on the Moon, Mars and elsewhere that are millions of years old.
One last point to consider in this alien megastructure subject, is the possibility that the Moon is actually an artificial object dragged into Earth orbit.
Related Could The Moon Be An Ancient Space Ark? | Strange Moon Facts
The scientists or layman seeking to understand what the WTF 001 observations are is considerably handicapped by an anthropomorphic viewpoint, that is, considering technology on Earth as a guide for searching for it in space. The idea that a mega structure around WTF 001 would emit infrared exhaust of wasted energy is a viewpoint based on the inefficient technology employed by modern civilization today.
But, it stands to reason that advanced extraterrestrial races have technology so far beyond the scope of human imagination that they could easily be thought of as magical; even that they are perfect in their usage of energy – no exhaust or waste to be found. This means being more open minded about interpreting these observations is essential so as to avoid misunderstanding; for scientific knowledge is extremely limited and this point should not be over looked.
Many of the accepted impossibilities within scientific circles must be questioned, as the basis for them, in most cases, is firmly entrenched in scientific dogma. Clearly there is much that is not understood by science in the universe, and we would do well not to dismiss any theory based on what we think we know.
Source – Ascension With Mother Earth
It’s either aliens or a swarm of comets: scientists baffled by WTF 001, our galaxy’s strangest star.
It has been called the most bizarre star in our galaxy and some think it just might be home to high-tech aliens.
The unlikely suggestion that aliens live in this star system is being taken so seriously that a team of astrophysicists wants to train a radio telescope in its direction to determine if any signals could indicate advanced extraterrestrial life.
Andrew Siemion, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, told Fairfax Media the star had become SETI’s candidate number one.
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| One outlandish hypothesis suggests the star’s light signal is caused by a Dyson sphere, an alien megastructure designed to capture solar energy. Photo: Artist’s impression by CapnHack |
It is clear that something big is blocking light coming from the star between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations, but no-one really knows what it is.
“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider,” Penn State astrophysicist Jason Wright told The Atlantic. “But this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build.”
The light from the star is “consistent with a swarm of megastructures” around it, he said.
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| KIC 8462852 has been informally renamed WTF 001. Photo: arXiv |
The star has the cumbersome name of KIC 8462852, but the research group that will look for “unambiguous indicators” of technology in the star system has renamed it WTF 001 – What the Flux. (Flux is the measured light from a star that reaches Earth).
“This is analogous to when pulsars were first discovered,” Dr Siemion told Fairfax Media. “They were identified as ‘LGM’ for little green men. So we are using WTF, partly in jest but partly to reflect the fact that we truly do not know what the changes in flux [in this star] are due to.”
It is not unusual for a star’s light to be blocked; periodic dimming of stars is one of the best ways to determine whether a star system has exoplanets – planets orbiting suns outside our solar system.
Related ‘Next-door neighbor’ Planet: 2nd Exoplanet Discovered 21 Light-Years From Earth
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| The Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico. Photo: Courtesy of NRAO/AUI and NRAO |
However, such planets typically dim a star’s brightness by no more than 1 per cent – and they do so in a very regular cycle, indicating the orbital period of a planet.
Whatever is blocking this star is very irregular and can block up to 22 per cent of its light.
“It’s certainly weird,” said Alan Duffy, Swinburne University astronomer. “It’s hard to imagine how you could block 20 per cent of light from a star. A star is huge. How do you block that much of it?”
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| Andrew Siemion, director of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, says the star is his organisation’s candidate number one. Photo: Supplied |
“We are running out of ideas as to what could be causing this dimming,” said Dr Duffy, who is not associated with the study of the star.
According to Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral astrophysicist at Yale University, the most likely natural explanation is that light from the star is being blocked by a massive swarm of comets that has descended close to the solar mass.
Her work is based on a discovery made by a group of citizen scientists through the Planet Hunters project. They discovered the unusual light signal while looking through data from more than 150,000 stars collected by the Kepler space observatory.
A paper Dr Boyajian published in September in arXiv methodically discounts what couldn’t be affecting the star’s light: it’s not the star pulsing, it’s not affected by a nearby dwarf star, it can’t be a dust cloud caused by an asteroid or planetary collision.
Dr Boyajian suggests that the nearby dwarf star could have disrupted a cloud of orbiting comets and sent them crashing in to a closer orbit. But she accepts that her paper only considers natural scenarios. She told The Atlantic that there were “other scenarios” she was considering.
Dr Wright at Penn State is about to publish an alternative explanation for the star’s light patterns. He told The Atlantic the patterns of light are also consistent with a “swarm of megastructures” orbiting the star, perhaps formed by enormous solar collectors.
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| Swinburne astronomer Alan Duffy says the star is ‘certainly weird’. Photo: Supplied |
Such energy collectors are dubbed Dyson structures, named after physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, who suggested in 1960 that advanced civilisations would use such structures to collect massive amounts of solar energy.
Dr Wright and Dr Boyajian are now working with Dr Siemion at SETI to work out WTF the star actually is.
Their research team will use the radio telescope at Greenbank, West Virginia, to see if there are any clear signals of electromagnetic energy in a narrow frequency range that could indicate radio technology. If they get anything unusual, they will use the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico to get a clearer picture.
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| Illustration: Cathy Wilcox |
Space anomaly gets extraterrestrial intelligence experts’ attention
The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute has its eyes — and soon possibly one of the United States’ premier telescopes — focused on an anomaly that some astronomers can’t quite explain.
Users on the online astronomy crowdsourcing interface, Planet Hunters, discovered a peculiar light pattern between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations a few years ago. The group uses publicly available data gathered by NASA’s Kepler Telescope, which has been tasked with finding Earth-like planets by searching for the periodic dimming of stars that might suggest such a planet is passing by.
After a number of users noticed the peculiarity, it was sent to the group’s advisory science team that includes Yale postdoctoral astronomy student Tabetha Boyajian.
“It did definitely spark some lively discussions on the talk boards. We scrolled through the discussion boards and superusers, and they let us know that there’s something we should be watching out for,” Boyajian says.
So what’s the explanation? Could it be from a swarm of comets? Some sort of intergalactic phenomenon that Earthbound scientists haven’t discovered yet? Or an effect of planet-sized structures built by some sort of alien civilization?
Jason Wright, a Penn State astronomy professor, saw Boyajian’s data and can’t quite explain it. But in a post Thursday to his website, he cautioned against jumping to conclusions — as some apparently have — that intelligent beings far away are behind this oddity.
“My philosophy of SETI,” Wright wrote, referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, “is that you should reserve your alien hypothesis as a last resort.” He also cited “Cochran’s Commandment to planet hunters … : Thou shalt not embarrass thyself and they colleagues by claiming false planets.”
“It would be such a big deal if true, it’s important that you be absolutely sure before claiming you’ve detected something, lest everybody lose credibility,” the astronomer added. “Much more so for SETI.”
Comet swarm or sign of alien intelligence?
The star, identified by researchers as KIC 8462852 — though Wright calls it “Tabby’s star” and his team labels it the “WTF star,” after the subtitle to Boyajian’s paper, “Where’s the flux?” — is roughly 1,465 light-years from Earth, or about 8.6 quadrillion miles.
Along with a group of colleagues, Boyajian published an academic paper last month about the star and concluded the light peculiarities could have been the result of comet fragments.
This is “a plausible but contrived natural explanation,” according to Wright.
“I would put low odds on that being the right answer,” the Penn State astronomer said. “But it’s by far the best one I’ve seen so far (and much more likely than aliens, I’d say).”
Boyajian herself stressed “the necessity of future observations to help interpret the system,” which is why she and her cohorts took the paper to Andrew Siemion, the head of the University of California-Berkeley’s SETI Group. They wanted answers, and they said top-notch telescopes were needed to get them.
“At first I thought they were absolutely nuts — it wasn’t until they told me their data had been vetted by the Kepler team at NASA,” Siemion said.
The California-based astronomer, who’s been working on the search for extraterrestrial intelligence for about 10 years, called the findings “very atypical.”
“This is one of maybe only two or three times we’ve been contacted by an astronomer who says there’s something we don’t understand,” he said. “It is a very strange object.”
Request put in to use radio telescope
Siemion submitted a series of proposals to use telescopes — including the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, which the National Radio Astronomy Observatory calls the premier single-dish radio telescope — to look deeper into the anomaly.
The Green Bank telescope would be a good fit, given that SETI involves the search for extraterrestrial intelligence using, of all things, radio waves. According to Siemion, “There are particular types of radio waves that as far as we know can only be produced by technology.”
“The advantage is that it’s very easy to distinguish,” he said. “Lots of the galaxies produces radio waves. If we see lots of energy in an area, it’s an unmistakable marker of technology.”
The SETI Institute, which is based in Northern California, expects to hear the results of its request within the next month or two.
“We’re going to look very closely, as closely as we can. We are limited in terms of how long we can view a target given the curvature of the earth (and) instrumentation,” Siemion said. “If we’re awarded the observation, we’ll have between 24 to 36 hours with a variety of different radio receivers.”
While those involved in this effort are hesitant to jump to conclusions about what exactly is going on, they do think it’s worth digging into it.
According to Yale’s Boyajian, “Information will allow us to confirm something or rule something out. We’re excited to learn all about this system — we want to figure it out.”
Has Kepler Discovered an Alien Megastructure?
But there’s also been speculation that Kepler may have the ability to detect more than natural phenomena; if they’re out there, Kepler may also detect the signature of artificial structures orbiting other stars. Imagine an advanced civilization that’s well up on the Kardashev scale and has the ability to harness energy directly from its star. This hypothetical alien civilization may want to construct vast megastructures, like supersized solar arrays in orbit around their host star, that could be so big that they blot out a sizable fraction of starlight as they pass in front.
13 Ways to Hunt Intelligent Aliens
When Kepler detects an exoplanet, it does so by sensing the very slight dip in starlight from a given star. The premise is simple: an exoplanet orbits in front of star (known as a “transit”), Kepler detects a slight dimming of starlight and creates a “lightcurve” — basically a graph charting the dip in starlight over time. Much information can be gleaned from the lightcurve, such as the physical size of the transiting exoplanet. But it can also deduce the exoplanet’s shape.
Normally the shape of an exoplanet isn’t particularly surprising because it’s, well, planet-shaped. It’s round. The physics of planetary formation dictate that a planetary body above a certain mass will be governed by hydrostatic equilibrium. But say if Kepler detects something that isn’t round. Well, that’s when things can get a bit weird.
For the most part, any dip in star brightness can be attributed to some kind of natural phenomenon. But what if all possibilities are accounted for and only one scenario is left? What if that scenario is this object appears to be artificial? In other words, what if it’s alien?
In a chilling article written by Ross Andersen of The Atlantic, at first glance, it seems we may be at this incredible juncture.
GALLERY: How Aliens Can Find Us (and Vice Versa)
A star, named KIC 8462852, has been found with a highly curious transit signal. In a paper submitted to the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers, including citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program, report: “Over the duration of the Kepler mission, KIC 8462852 was observed to undergo irregularly shaped, aperiodic dips in flux down to below the 20 percent level.”
The research paper is thorough, describing the phenomenon, pointing out that this star is unique – we’ve seen nothing like it. Kepler has collected data on this star steadily for four years. It’s not instrumental error. Kepler isn’t seeing things; the signal is real.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctorate researcher at Yale University and lead author, told The Atlantic. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
The Planet Hunters volunteers are depended on to seek out transits in Kepler’s stars in the direction of the constellation Cygnus. This is a huge quantity of data, from over 150,000 stars in Kepler’s original field of view, and you can’t beat the human eye when identifying a true dip in starlight brightness. The Planet Hunters described KIC 8462852 as “bizarre,” “interesting” and a “giant transit.” They’re not wrong.
ANALYSIS: Could Kepler Detect Alien Artifacts?
Follow-up studies focus on two interesting transit events at KIC 8462852, one that was detected between days 788 and 795 of the Kepler mission and between days 1510 to 1570. The researchers have tagged these events as D800 and D1500 respectively.
The D800 event appears to have been a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent, whereas D1500 was a burst of several transits, possibly indicating a clump of different objects, forcing a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. To cause such dips in brightness, these transiting objects must be huge.
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| The transit data for KIC 8462852, featuring the obvious transit features D800 and D1500. BOYAJIAN ET AL. |
The researchers worked through every known possibility, but each solution presented a new problem. For example, they investigated the possibility of some kind of circumstellar disk of dust. However, after looking for the infrared signal associated with these disks, no such signal could be seen.
Also, the star is a mature F-type star, approximately 1.5 times the size of our sun. Circumstellar disks are usually found around young stars.
ANALYSIS: Alien ‘Star Engine’ Detectable in Exoplanet Data?
The researchers also investigated the possibility of a huge planetary collision: could the debris from this smashup be creating this strange signal? The likelihood of us seeing a planetary collision is extremely low. There is no evidence in data taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) that a collision happened, creating a very tiny window of opportunity between WISE’s mission end and the beginning of Kepler’s mission (of a few years) for an astronomically unlikely cosmic event like this to occur.
The only natural explanation favored by the researchers seems to focus on an intervening clump of exocomets.
“One way we imagine such a barrage of comets could be triggered is by the passage of a field star through the system,” write the researchers.
Indeed, they argue, there’s a nearby star that might have tidally disturbed otherwise dormant comets in the outermost regions of the KIC 8462852 star system. This small star is located around 1,000 AU from KIC 8462852 and whether it’s a binary partner or an interstellar visitor, its presence may have caused some cometary turmoil. Like the other scenarios, however, the exocomet explanation still falls short of being fully satisfactory.
This research paper focuses only on natural and known possible causes of the mystery transit events around KIC 8462852. A second paper is currently being drafted to investigate a completely different transit scenario that focuses around the possibility of a mega-engineering project created by an advanced alien civilization.
ANALYSIS: Our Super-Advanced Alien Neighbors are Missing
This may sound like science fiction, but our galaxy has existed for over 13 billion years, it’s not such a stretch of the imagination to think that an alien civilization may be out there and evolved to the point where they can build megastructures around stars.
“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build,” Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, told The Atlantic.
Indeed, hunting down huge structures that obscure the light from stars is no new thing. The Search for Extraterrestrial Technology (SETT) is one such project that does just this. Only recently, a survey of the local universe focused on the hope of detecting the waste heat generated by a technologically advanced civilization, specifically a Type II Kardashev civilization.
On the Kardashev scale, a Type II civilization has the ability to utilize all the available energy radiating from a star. Using a vast shell or series of rings surrounding a star, a Dyson sphere-like structure may be constructed. This has the effect of blotting out the star from view in visible wavelengths, but once the solar energy has been used by the alien civilization, the energy is shifted to longer wavelengths and likely lost as infrared radiation.
ANALYSIS: Could We Detect an Alien Civilization’s Waste Heat?
This recent search for aliens’ waste heat drew a blank, reaching the conclusion that as there appears to be no alien intelligence cocooning stars to harvest their heat, there’s likely no Type II civilization nearby.
But as KIC 8462852 is showing us, there may be something else out there — possibly an alien intelligence that is well on its way to becoming a Type II civilization, which is setting up some kind of artificial structure around its star.
Of course, these mystery transit events are nowhere near “proof” of an alien civilization. In fact, it’s barely evidence and a lot more work needs to be done.
The next step is to point a radio antenna at KIC 8462852, just to see whether the system is generating any artificial radio signals that could indicate the presence of something we’d define as “intelligent.” Boyajian and Wright have now teamed up with Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to get a radio telescope to listen into the star and if they detect an artificial signal, they will request time on the Very Large Array (VLA) to deduce whether any radio signals from that star are the chatter of an alien civilization.
It might be a long shot, and the phenomenon is more likely a clump of comets or some other natural phenomenon that we haven’t accounted for blocking star light from view, but it’s worth investigating, especially if there really is some kind of alien intelligence building structures, or perhaps, ancient structures of a civilization long-gone, around a star only 1,500 light-years away from Earth.
Source:
http://www.ascensionwithearth.com/2015/10/main-stream-scientists-are-baffled-at.html
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