Posted on 10/14/2015 5:52:29 PM PDT by kitchen
Astronomers have spotted a strange mess of objects whirling around a distant star. Scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations are scrambling to get a closer look.
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.
“We’d never seen anything like this star,” says Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale. “It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
Kepler was looking for tiny dips in the light emitted by this star. Indeed, it was looking for these dips in more than 150,000 stars, simultaneously, because these dips are often shadows cast by transiting planets. Especially when they repeat, periodically, as you’d expect if they were caused by orbiting objects.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
To telescopic eye
Infinity
The star that would not die
All who dare
To cross her course
Are swallowed by
A fearsome force
Sad that if ET is phoning us, by the time we could get a message to them we would both be ancient history.
Money quote:
“Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
It looks like “aliens” was their very first suggestion ...
Sure, they’ve found the Puppeteers Fleet!
Look at hundreds of thousands of stars and you’re bound to see something so coincidental it can’t be explained.
How far away is it?
Freegards
And the next was, "there's nobody there for the star to 'murder'."
I am not familiar with ‘there’s nobody there for the star to ‘murder.’ Music or movie?
Cygnus is male. Stop the Jennerization of astronomy!
They found Ringworld?
Heh, I glanced at the title, and read “Murderous” not “Mysterious”!
No mention of far away this star is, which could have a bearing in looking for signals.
Cygnus the Swan aka “the Summer Triangle” aka “the Northern Cross”. Main three stars: Altair, Deneb and Vega. Vega is very bright and bluish and almost straight overhead after sunset on a summer night in the northern hemisphere.
At the speed of light, what they are watching could have happened at least a year or two.
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