The evidence for aliens around one of the weirdest stars in our galaxy — Boyajian's star — is not looking promising. The star's unusual dimming events have garnered some bizarre theories: One of them speculates that an alien megastructure is responsible for the light anomalies.
But, a new study searching for signs of extraterrestrials has not turned up any evidence to back up that theory.
Such an alien civilization, capable of building a starlight-blocking megastructure, would possibly communicate using lasers. With that in mind, David Lipman, an undergraduate at Princeton University, and collaborating astronomers looked for signatures of lasers in the light from Boyajian's star, largely using openly available data. The group found no evidence of even low-power lasers — ones that even our technically young civilization could conceivably manage, they write in their study, which was accepted for publication in the journal Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. [Greetings, Earthlings! 8 Ways Aliens Could Contact Us]
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