Mysterious star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, whose unusual “blinking” indicates the possible existence of a super-developed civilization of aliens in its vicinity, again began to fade, reports astronomer Jason Wright of the University of Pennsylvania.
“The star of Tabet again began to fade, I call on all astronomers working now on telescopes to get its spectrum and publish it,” the scientist writes in his microblog on the Twitter network.
In mid-October 2015, Tabetha Boyajian of Yale University and her colleagues described unusual fluctuations in the brightness of the star KIC 8462852 in the constellation Cygnus, which may indicate the presence in its vicinity of the so-called Dyson sphere created by a super-developed civilization of aliens.
Initially, scientists assumed that such a “blink” of the star could be caused by a swarm of comets that closed its light from observers on Earth, but in January 2016 the American astronomer Bradley Schaefer found that the brightness of KIC 8462852 inexplicably fell by 0.16 magnitude in the last Century, which cast doubt on this theory.
Initially, a number of skeptics tried to deny the very fact of the tarnishing of KIC 8462852 in the short and long term, but later scientists working with the Kepler telescope, as well as Russian astronomers from the Pulkovo Observatory, confirmed that the brightness of this star was falling in the past.
Today, the brightness of KIC 8462852 again began to fall and at the current moment, as reported by Boyadzhian itself, it fell by 2% and continues to fall. As noted David Kipping, a famous planetologist from the University of Columbia in New York, this is the first such tarnishing since March 2011 and February 2013, when sharp drops in the brightness of the star were recorded by the Kepler telescope, continuously looking at the constellation Cygnus and Lira at the first stage of his work.
Now KIC 8462852 is behind the Sun for observers on Earth, because of which it is extremely difficult to monitor it. As scientists hope, new data on its spectrum will still be obtained, which will help to understand what makes it tarnish and whether or not there is a super-developed civilization of aliens in its vicinity.
