Dyson swarm spotted?

[hanelyp]

I'm not sure how credible this is...

Quote:A series of mysterious objects surrounding a giant star millions of miles away could be an alien megastructure, experts believe.

Planet spotters examining data from the Kepler Space Telescope were startled by an unusual light pattern orbiting a star called KIC 8462852.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/alien-megastructure-could-surround-giant-6632574

[JoeStrout]

Thanks for posting that, it's really interesting.

This PopSci article has slightly more detail.  (EDIT: This Discovery.com article is even better.)  It's probably just a swarm of comets or something, but any time we see something we don't understand, it's a good day for science!

[hanelyp]

Looking at the Discovery.com article, making the assumption that the earlier isolated transit is a single circular object in the neighborhood of the star, a 15% dimming comes to an object ~39% of the star's diameter. That is HUGE!

Digging into the more detailed light curves in the paper at http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.03622, that event appears to be a largely transparent or dispersed object or cluster even larger across than the star, with a core denser than the periphery.