NASA May Have Found Evidence of an Advanced Alien Civilization in the Cygnus Star System
KIC 8462852
Also known as Tabby’s star, has shown inexplicable fluctuations in its brightness, potentially suggesting the presence of an advanced civilization.
There’s one star that many astronomers, both amateur and professional, are focusing on right now, known as KIC 8462852, or Tabby’s star. The odd nature of this star has led some to believe that it could possibly be a sign of highly intelligent alien life in the Cygnus star system, some 1,280 light years from us. What’s so intriguing about Tabby’s star is that it has been dimming drastically over time and in dramatic fluctuations.
These fluctuations have confounded scientists who have trained a multitude of high-powered telescopes on it, including NASA’s Kepler telescope that originally discovered it. The massive dips that have been recorded in its luminosity have led some to speculate that it could be an advanced alien civilization building a Dyson sphere or swarm around the star, harvesting its energy in a process referred to as star lifting.
Tabby’s star was first discovered by an astronomer at LSU, named Tabatha Boyajian. She is now the head of the Planet Hunters project, a program that searches for exoplanets in other solar systems, especially those that could potentially harbor life. She said that initially the program would have been deemed a success if they found just one exoplanet that fell in the habitable zone, but it has since found more than 50. But the program has received the most attention due to its recent observations of KIC 8462852, which has been exhibiting a phenomenon that scientists can’t fully explain.
What’s so strange about Tabby’s Star is that astronomers have recorded drastic dips in its brightness by up to 20 percent. To put it into perspective, usually a planet orbiting a star will only generate a one percent decrease in light. And while a decrease in brightness of this magnitude is common in young stars, due to their protoplanetary disks, Tabby’s star is not young and a disk has been ruled out from infrared imaging.
Numerous theories have been proposed to define the anomalies in the data associated with Tabby’s star, but none have succeeded in fully explaining what’s going on. Even Tabby, herself, hasn’t ruled out the possibility that it could be an alien civilization. She’s even asked some friends at SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) to aim a radio telescope on the planet to see if they can pick up any signals being transmitted form the area.
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Kepler Data for Tabby’s Star
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The Dyson sphere, in its different variations, is a concept first theorized in science fiction and made popular by Freeman Dyson. It fulfills a specific criterion on the Kardshev Scale, a hypothetical measure for the level of technological advancement of a civilization. Once a civilization reaches the point that it can harness all of the energy on its planet and others in its solar system, it would supposedly move on to build a sphere around its star, in order to meet its energy needs.
Scientists believe that whatever is orbiting Tabby’s star is within the habitable zone. And while some skeptics say that the strange results are simply incorrect data or bands of asteroids orbiting the star, many of these assertions have been disproven and no theory has sufficiently explained what’s going on.
Another bizarre variable that is evident in the observations is that the light coming from the star is blocked in an asymmetrical manner. If it were a planet or other orbiting body, one would expect to see symmetry. The star also appears to show an overall dimming over time, since observations began in the early 1900s. On average, the star has been dimming by 16 percent every 100 years. This is a highly unusual rate to see a star’s luminosity diminish. This could allow for two assumptions regarding the alien hypothesis. Either they are slowly extracting energy from the star, or they are slowly building solar panels around the star, blocking more of the light that we are able to see.
One might argue that this civilization would have to be moving very quickly to build its Dyson sphere, as Tabby’s star is 1.6 times the size of our sun. Also, one would expect to see an expulsion of waste, likely in the form of radiation, if they were harvesting directly from the star. But one user in the Reddit forum that is dedicated specifically to the star, brought up science fiction novelist, Arthur C. Clarke’s, third law regarding advanced civilizations; any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic. Essentially, a civilization’s technology, that is advanced to the point of harvesting energy from a star, would be incomprehensible to us.
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A Dyson Swarm or Dyson Sphere
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Now that our attention is piqued and we have a number of eyes and ears trained on Tabby’s star maybe we’ll be able to discover what’s really going on in the Cygnus constellation. Is it simply a natural phenomenon that will lead us to new discoveries or groundbreaking evidence of a hyper-advanced civilization? Hopefully we will soon learn more.
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Alleged Volcanic Eruption on Mars Sparks NASA Cover-Up Conspiracy
Conspiracy and speculation erupted across the internet yesterday over an alleged volcanic plume stretching roughly 1,200 miles across the Martian atmosphere. The plume appears to originate from the planet’s supposedly dormant Arsia Mons volcano.
Images of the activity were taken on Sept. 24 by the Mars Express orbiter and later published by the European Space Agency.
According to NASA, volcanic activity on the red planet ceased some 50 million years ago after Earth’s Cretaceous-Paleogene event that killed off the dinosaurs, but some believe this latest imaging shows otherwise.
Spurred by conjecture from a popular YouTube conspiracy channel, claims of volcanic activity on Mars reignited theories of government cover-ups and strange happenings within NASA, the FBI and other controversial government agencies.
Many are pointing to last month’s Sunspot National Observatory shutdown, the switch to a limited “safe mode” on the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, and the sudden failure of NASA’s Mars Curiosity Rover as evidence that strange events occurring on the planet may be intentionally obfuscated.
Arsia Mons is located within a tightly situated line of volcanoes on Mars, collectively known as Tharsis Montes, which lie in the shadow of Olympus Mons – the largest volcano in our solar system (more than twice the size of Mt. Everest).
Arsia Mons happens to be the planet’s second largest volcano in terms of volume and is home to a series of caves NASA has studied as the best places to situate research and habitation modules. Could there be something already underway?
“This project developed a revolutionary system to exploit the novel idea of extraterrestrial cave use” stated a project summary published in 2004, further explaining that two “missions” were tested to gather data.
Arsia Mons is known to have an annual whether phenomenon in which sunlight warms the area around the volcano, bringing small amounts of dust into the air. Rising air currents bring this dust and other fine sediment above the volcano’s caldera into a thick, spiraling cloud that is big enough to be seen by a probe orbiting the planet.
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But the latest plume looks nothing like the spiraling cloud recorded from this phenomenon in the past. Instead it appears as more of a streaking trail that’s persisted over the course of weeks.
NASA has attributed the plume to water ice clouds that are gathering over the volcano. The agency says that at certain times of year, the small amounts of water in the atmosphere freeze and condense near areas of high altitude, notably above this volcanic region.
If this is the case, then maybe there’s significantly more water on the red planet than previously believed and we should study the areas it’s sublimating from.
But then again, there’s always some simple explanation from NASA that seems to make everyone’s concerns seem trivial. Is this really just a storm or are they covering up something far greater?
For more on the drips of disclosure coming from NASA’s Mars operations, check out this episode of Deep Space:
