I love the story The Atlantic ran about the mysterious star the Kepler Space Observatory had discovered. I won’t rehash what the story was on it (you can click the link above for that), and it’s surely a longshot — but it’s fascinating that the scientists studying it aren’t ruling out that it, at least in theory, could be an alien civilization.
Since the cosmos is rarely forthcoming with such awesomeness, it’s probably some space-ordinary phenomenon. But if it were a Dyson Sphere created by a Type II Kardashev alien civilization, how cool would that be? Way cool.
Personally, I’m just pleased that the astronomers and astrophysicists involved in the project can’t rule it out at this point. We’ll hopefully get more information on it once they aim powerful radio telescopes at the star in question and try to pick up signals, etc. They’ll be searching in January, and then later in 2016, so we’ll see what turns up.
As a fan (and writer of) science fiction, this is particularly exciting. Again, it’s too early to get one’s hopes up, but it’s awesome that out of 150,000 stars surveyed by the Kepler, this one turned up with that interesting information, and that they’d ruled out the more conventional explanations for the unusual data they received from it.
*d