The first event showed a single transit causing a star brightness drop-off of 15 percent, while the second event manifested as a burst of several transits, possibly indicating towards mass of different objects, resulting in a brightness dip of up to 22 percent. For such a major dip in brightness to occure, the transiting objects have to be extremely big.

Considering that our galaxy has existed for more than 13 billion years, it’s not hard to imagine that an alien civilization may be out there, possessing technology that allows them to 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, astronomer from Penn State University

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After analyzing all possible situations, scientists concluded that this strange anomaly might be the result of a group of dormant comets recently disturbed by a nearby star. Because this theory is not all that convincing, other researchers are already hypothesizing the possibility of a mega-engineered project created by a Type 2 alien civilization on the Kardashev scale.

This type of aliens would have the ability to use all the available energy radiating from a star. With the help of a vast shell or series of rings surrounding a star, a Dyson sphere-like structure could be constructed. This would block out the star from sight in visible wavelengths, but once the solar energy has been utilized by the alien civilization, the energy would be shifted to longer wavelengths and probably lost as infrared radiation.

Puzzled by these strange recordings, scientists are now trying to point a radio antenna at KIC 8462852 in order to solve the riddle. By doing so, they will be able to detect any artificial radio signals coming from the star and will determine whether or not an intelligent, Type 2 civilization exists in our vicinity, only 1,500 light-years away.

Meanwhile, a second paper is being drafted by top researchers in order to analyze the transit scenario focusing around the possibility of a colossal artificial device engineered by advanced aliens.