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March 29 2024 1.33pm

Astronomers Have Spotted An 'Alien Megastructure'

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View Red-Blue-Yellow's Profile Red-Blue-Yellow Flag Surrey 22 Oct 15 11.54am Send a Private Message to Red-Blue-Yellow Add Red-Blue-Yellow as a friend

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.

A large cluster of objects in space have been spotted and astronomers are losing their minds because they look like something: "You would expect an alien civilization to build."

In 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope was scanning the nights skies, studying the vast space between the Milky Way's Cygnus and Lyra constellations, when it picked up something incredibly interesting that could quite genuinely be confirmation of extraterrestrial life.

The study stumbled across an incredibly large object that's in orbit around a star (KIC 8462852) and they're pretty sure it's not a planet. In fact the boffins are going as far as to describe the complex object as a "swarm of megastructures."

Astronomers were studying the obscurely-named KIC 8462852 star at the time - a possible candidate for having planets with an Earth-like orbit, that could hold the potential for intelligent life. It wasn't until 2011, when Kepler's 'Planet Hunter' enthusiasts were assessing the data that they saw something they described as "bizarre".

Something about KIC 8462852's light pattern was irregular. The Kepler mission detects exoplanets that hold the potential for being Earth-like by looking for subtle fluctuations in the light of stars: as a planet passes between the star and Kepler, the light will dim, indicating the size and orbit of the planet.

"We’d never seen anything like this star. It was really weird," Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc astronomer at Yale told Atlantic. "We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."

The star KIC 8462852 is being orbited by a complex group of objects - something like the debris usually associated with a newly-formed star that gradually becomes planets. Except, KIC 8462852 is far too old for this sort of planet formation.

They could be asteroids, sucked in from an unusual set of overlapping orbits are it could be a ruptured planet, but Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, believes this "swarm of megastructures" could be something far more sci-fi: alien technology used to collect energy from the star.

"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," Wright told Atlantic. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."

So what next?

Boyajian and Wright are looking to write a proposal to point a huge radio dish at KIC 8462852 in January, in the hope of picking up unusual radio wave.

Should they detect a sizeable amount of radio traffic, they'll be able to borrow the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico - which should be able to determine if the "megastructure" is giving off similar radio waves to our own satellites and technology.

Until then, we're just going to have to sit tight - unless they call us first.

Watch this space.

SOURCE: The Atlantic [Link]

 


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View Kermit8's Profile Kermit8 Flag Hevon 22 Oct 15 12.40pm Send a Private Message to Kermit8 Add Kermit8 as a friend

gonna take at least five years to get there. Who is bold enough to undertake that?

Gary, Robbie, Mark or those other two?

 


Big chest and massive boobs

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jamiemartin721 Flag Reading 22 Oct 15 12.45pm

Quote Kermit8 at 22 Oct 2015 12.40pm

gonna take at least five years to get there. Who is bold enough to undertake that?

Gary, Robbie, Mark or those other two?

Dannyh, he'll be there in fifteen minutes.


 


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View dannyh's Profile dannyh Flag wherever I lay my hat....... 22 Oct 15 1.27pm Send a Private Message to dannyh Add dannyh as a friend

Not allowed back mate, missunderstanding with the green bird with three tits.

 


"It's not the bullet that's got my name on it that concerns me; it's all them other ones flyin' around marked 'To Whom It May Concern.'"

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Hoof Hearted 22 Oct 15 2.52pm

I've been making a big mound of mash on my dinner plate lately..........

 

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Yellow Card - User has been warned of conduct on the messageboards View Hrolf The Ganger's Profile Hrolf The Ganger Flag 22 Oct 15 3.02pm Send a Private Message to Hrolf The Ganger Add Hrolf The Ganger as a friend

Don't need psychic transmissions now. We have the Internet.

devils_tower_hdr_01.jpg Attachment: devils_tower_hdr_01.jpg (267.40Kb)

 

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View Forest Hillbilly's Profile Forest Hillbilly Flag in a hidey-hole 22 Oct 15 3.48pm Send a Private Message to Forest Hillbilly Add Forest Hillbilly as a friend

Earth has been giving off radio waves since the 1920/30's. If there were life more intelligent than us out there, they would surely have detected us first.

Not wishing to rain on any ET theorists, but these magastructures could be a large asteroid belt, else the remains of another fcked-up planet where people couldn't be nice to each other, and blew themselves to smithereens.

 


"The facts have changed", Rishi Sunak

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View beer man's Profile beer man Flag Kent 22 Oct 15 4.15pm Send a Private Message to beer man Add beer man as a friend

I'm more inclined to accept the proposal that Ian Duncan Smith is most likely to be the sort of structure you'd expect an hostile alien civilisation to have built.

Edited by beer man (22 Oct 2015 4.15pm)

 

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View twist's Profile twist Flag Miami, Florida 22 Oct 15 4.19pm Send a Private Message to twist Add twist as a friend

As Hawking said, theres only 2 reasons aliens would want to come here, and neither of them are good.
Please point your satellite dishes elsewhere....thanks.

 

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jamiemartin721 Flag Reading 22 Oct 15 4.29pm

Quote twist at 22 Oct 2015 4.19pm

As Hawking said, theres only 2 reasons aliens would want to come here, and neither of them are good.
Please point your satellite dishes elsewhere....thanks.

I can think of a third, the driving force of progress, which is to see 'different naked things and get some strange'.

Whilst most people probably couldn't be arsed with spending years in space travelling to enslave another world, or eat them unless absolutely necessary, the prospect of getting it on with some 'strange' would pretty much create a queue of folks at the cryopod.

Science always forgets that before anything else is considered, humans generally will assess the 'new sexual experience' above anything else. Its the dark truth of human progress, but basically art and most technology have prospered in their 'darker hours' through their capacity to spice us erotically.

Sure, the printing press made it possible for us to all own and not read Don Quixotie, but it was the smut that kept the business going, same with the camera and the same with the internet, projection technology, art and sculpture.

If aliens come here, if they're like us, sex tourism will probably be a major factor.


 


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Yellow Card - User has been warned of conduct on the messageboards View Hrolf The Ganger's Profile Hrolf The Ganger Flag 22 Oct 15 4.37pm Send a Private Message to Hrolf The Ganger Add Hrolf The Ganger as a friend

Here we have a subject where no one is an expert.
I hear all kinds of speculation on this topic and that is all it is.
The Drake equation is next to useless.

I have seen a very convincing UFO and so have others I know.
I also know a great Roswell story from someone there at the time. I am very open minded about the whole subject.

 

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View ASCPFC's Profile ASCPFC Flag Pro-Cathedral/caravan park 22 Oct 15 4.38pm Send a Private Message to ASCPFC Add ASCPFC as a friend

Quote jamiemartin721 at 22 Oct 2015 4.29pm

Quote twist at 22 Oct 2015 4.19pm

As Hawking said, theres only 2 reasons aliens would want to come here, and neither of them are good.
Please point your satellite dishes elsewhere....thanks.

I can think of a third, the driving force of progress, which is to see 'different naked things and get some strange'.

Whilst most people probably couldn't be arsed with spending years in space travelling to enslave another world, or eat them unless absolutely necessary, the prospect of getting it on with some 'strange' would pretty much create a queue of folks at the cryopod.

Science always forgets that before anything else is considered, humans generally will assess the 'new sexual experience' above anything else. Its the dark truth of human progress, but basically art and most technology have prospered in their 'darker hours' through their capacity to spice us erotically.

Sure, the printing press made it possible for us to all own and not read Don Quixotie, but it was the smut that kept the business going, same with the camera and the same with the internet, projection technology, art and sculpture.

If aliens come here, if they're like us, sex tourism will probably be a major factor.



May not have genders as such - which will make it all the more entertaining, for some anyway.

 


Red and Blue Army!

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