WASHINGTON: A mysterious star located about 1,500 light-years from the Earth has stirred controversy due to unusual fluctuations of light, leading some to theorise that an alien civilisation could have been found. Not so fast, said Nasa.

“The mysterious star, KIC 8462852, does have an odd light curve,” said Steve Howell, a US space agency scientist working on the Kepler space telescope’s planet-hunting mission, which launched in 2009 but lost its key orientation abilities in 2013.

“It does not look like a normal exoplanet or binary star light curve.

However, I think that saying that it immediately is alien is a bit of a stretch,” Howell said in an email.

A paper recently authored by Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral student at Yale University, and several citizen scientists, described the planet as having a unusual light pattern, and suggested that it appeared to have matter circling it.

The paper was published in October in a British journal called the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“We’d never seen anything like this star,” Boyajian was quoted as saying in The Atlantic magazine.

“It was really weird”. Kepler observes distant planets and stars by observing transits, or the dimming of light when another celestial body passes in front.

The light from this strange world was seen to dim from 15 to 22 per cent at irregular intervals. A planet could not be the cause, because even if it were the size of Jupiter — the largest planet in our solar system — the light from the star would dim only about one percent when it passed in between the star and the telescope.

Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2015

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