It's a claim so astonishing that it seems impossible to take seriously.
But astronomers weren't joking when they said an "alien megastructure" could be orbiting a far-away sun.
Now a group of stargazers has launched a bid to raise enough cash to solve the riddle of the "most mysterious star in the galaxy", which has the official name of KIC 8462852 but is more commonly called Tabby's Star.
A team from Yale University has launched a Kickstarter crowdfunding bid to raise $100,000 "to secure the telescope time necessary to solve the mystery".
"There is still no widely accepted theory to what is behind this star’s strange behaviour," wrote astronomer Tabetha Boyajian , who was the first to notice its weird "blinking".
In a paper entitled "What The Flux", Boyajian described how the light produced by the far-off sun dimmed periodically.
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