Late last year, one of the stars that NASA’s Kepler mission was observing made headlines for having a very unusual signal around it. Rather than a standard planet-like signal, it saw something we couldn’t explain: huge quantities of blocked light in varying amounts. Immediately, the speculation ran rampant, including from Penn State astronomy professor Jason Wright, who noted that the five separate large dips in the light, which did not occur at regular intervals, might be something far better than planets, comets, dust or even an ultra-massive ringed system.
It might be evidence of aliens building gigantic structures around their own star to harness its energy, and we might be seeing evidence of a work-in-progress.
Could this be right? Let’s take a deep look at the evidence and see. When we look out at the stars in our Milky Way, there are a few telltale signatures of planets around other stars. In particular, there are two main pathways we can use to identify them:
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