A math professor in Germany has come up with a possible explanation for the mysterious brightening and dimming of Tabby's Star:
It's being mined for energy by an alien civilization.
Known officially as KIC 8462852, Tabby Star's inexplicable light fluctuation, first discovered last year, has baffled scientists, with explanations ranging from a dust ring surrounding the star to a hail of comets passing in between the star and Earth, the Daily Mail reported.
But in a new paper, Eduard Heindl of Furtwangen University in Germany has come up with a mathematical model to support the involvement of aliens in the process.
"If a super civilization has used all raw material of its planets, they could found more in their star," Heindl told the Daily Mail.
"This is done by star lifting," he said. "We don't know exactly how to do that, but a good guess is, heat one spot of the sun beyond the normal temperature by mirrors and generate a beam of matter by magnetic fields."
In his paper, Heindle explains:
"The light curve is unusually smooth but the very steep edges make it hard to find a simple natural explanation by covering due to comets or other well-known planetary objects. We describe a mathematical approximation to the light curve, which is motivated by a physically meaningful event of a large stellar beam which generates an orbiting cloud."
"The data might fit to the science fiction idea of star lifting, a mining technology that could extract star matter."
The Daily Mail reported that one suggested method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere, which would consist of a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star.
No such a structure has not been detected so far, the Daily Mail reported.
"We recommend further exploration of this concept with refined models," Heindle told the outlet.
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