In a relatively distant place, approximately 1,480 light years away from Earth, sits one of the most controversial objects in our galaxy, KIC 8462852, as its dubbed, clearly becomes the primary subject of much ongoing research.
The star KIC 8462852 is apparently a completely-ordinary main sequence star, much like our sun, with no spectral peculiarities and no emission lines or anything unusual; Its located in the constellation Cygnus, appearing in the original field studied with the NASA’ Kepler spacecraft.
But this star catch our attention being in the news recently for unexplained and strange behavior, too odd even by the generous standards of cosmic phenomena.
The Planet Hunters project discovered in the Kepler light curve that KIC 8462852 displays a unique series of aperiodic dips in brightness, the star faded by 0.2%–20% with duration from a day to weeks — such fast variations of a single main sequence star are inexplicable.
In September 2015 astronomers and citizen scientists associated with the project uploaded a paper on arXiv describing the data and possible interpretations of KIC 8462852 behavior.
Since the paper was published, scientists have been speculating on what could be causing such irregular dips. Yale University researcher Tabetha Boyajian, who first spotted KIC 8462852 signals, published a study which describes various scenarios to explain the dipping events observed in the Kepler light curve. But lately, most of the proposed scenarios are ruled out due to the lack of evidence.
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