As first reported in this magazine, there is a star in the constellation Cygnus that behaves like no other. During the years-long stare of the Kepler space observatory, this otherwise run-of-the mill star—a bit hotter and more massive than the Sun—exhibited an extraordinary series of dimming events, as though briefly and occasionally eclipsed by an irregular series of large, opaque objects, the nature of which can only be guessed.
Discovered by citizen scientists scouring data publicly available through the crowdsourced Planet Hunters effort, these dimming events kicked off a years-long effort by a team led by Tabetha Boyajian at Yale to figure out what was going on with the star. After working with NASA to rule out technical issues that might have caused the oddities, they scrutinized the star itself for evidence that it might be unusually young, as very young stars have disks of warm dust, gas, and rocks orbiting them that can create all sorts of strange behavior.
The star proved to be completely pedestrian: Not only does it appear to be mature and lack any disk of material, it showed no other signs of peculiarity, either. If not for the Kepler data, the star would attract no attention at all.
But attract attention it has. The star with its weird behavior has not only captured the imagination of professional astronomers determined to solve the puzzle, but has also gained notoriety in the eyes of the public. The star found fame—from Saturday Night Live to Late Night with Stephen Colbert—because of a suggestion by astronomers (alright, we admit it was us) that radio astronomers partaking in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) should point their telescopes that way.
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