Alien ‘megastructures’ could be orbiting outside our galaxy: Astronomers

Alarge cluster of objects orbiting a star above the Milky Way look likesomething you would “expect an alien civilization to build”, astronomers have said, according to a report in the Independent, which added that Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, isset to publish findings on the “bizarre” objects suggesting they could be a “swarm of megastructures.”

“I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,”Wright told the Atlantic. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The star system first attracted the attention of astronomers in 2009 when the Kepler Space Telescope identified the area as potentially having planets in its orbit that are similar to Earth and for emitting a stranger light pattern than many other stars.

As civilizations become more technologically advanced, they create new and better ways of collecting energy — with the end result being the harnessing of energy directly from their star, according to the article, which added that scientists speculate that the megastructure placed around the star system could be a huge set of solar panels.

Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale, told the Atlantic, “We’d never seen anything like this. … It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”

Astronomers want to use a radio dish to look for wavelengths associated with technological civilizations, the Independent reported, stating that the first observations could take place as early as January.