Scientists don’t really know what they are looking at, but some haven’t ruled out an extraterrestrial interpretation.
If you spend anytime on the internet, you probably ran across a bunch of exciting headlines talking about a possible "alien superstructure" this past week.
Alex Kasprak for BuzzFeed / Lucas Films / Via wired.com
All this noise came to light after The Atlantic reported on a scientific paper about a bizarre star that the exoplanet-hunting Kepler Space Telescope has been monitoring.
NASA/JPL-Caltech/Wendy Stenzel / Via kepler.nasa.gov
This telescope has been constantly monitoring the brightness of over 145,000 stars to look for dips in light caused by objects blocking a fraction of the star's light during a transit.
This method has led to the discovery of over 1,000 planets orbiting other stars in the Milky Way.
NASA Kepler Mission/Dana Berry / Via youtube.com
Things obviously get more complicated when there are a bunch of different-sized objects in orbit around the same star, but some expert-level math can normally figure out what's going on.
With enough data, scientists can tell you things about the mass of the planet(s), the shape and size of their orbit(s), and how close to the star they are.
localhorst/reddit / Via giphy.com
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