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Civilian astronomers participating in the Kepler Planet Hunters program have identified unusual patterns in the light output of a star that is otherwise invisible to the naked eye — patterns that are being caused by an as yet unknown process. This appears to be some sort of huge debris field–or is it a field of artifacts created by an advanced alien civilization?

The star in question, KIC 8462852, is 1,500 light-years away, lies between the constellations Cygnus and Lyra. It was included as part of observations being made by the Kepler Space Telescope, which seeks signs of exoplanets around stars, by watching for dips in the stars’ light output.
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10 fast radio bursts have been detected in the past 15 years that all have the same unusual characteristic of an arrival delay close to a multiple of 187.5. There is no known natural process to explain this. Initially the bursts appeared to be coming from billions of light years away, far outside of our own galaxy. But recent analysis suggests that they may be coming from a group of objects in the Milky Way. Michael Hippke of the Institute for Data Analysis in Germany and John Learned at the University of Hawaii say that if the pattern is real, it is very hard to explain. There is a 5 in 10,000 probability that the line up is a coincidence. If it is a natural process, perhaps in some way involving pulsars, it is the result of a physics that we don’t yet understand.read more