Mysterious star now focus of earth’s most powerful alien-hunting telescope

A mysterious structure orbits a star almost 1,500 light-years from Earth. Its enormous size and unusual shape has made its host star, KIC 8462852 — Tabby’s star — a subject of interest, speculation, and controversy over the past year, with some experts even suggesting it could be an alien megastructure.

Most astronomers remain skeptical about that but are nonetheless intrigued as Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) projects to observe Tabby’s star continue.

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Now, a team of University of California, Berkeley astronomers have turned their gaze toward Tabby’s Star as a part of its 10-year, $100 million initiative to find extraterrestrial intelligence.

“The Breakthrough Listen program has the most powerful SETI equipment on the planet, and access to the largest telescopes on the planet,” Dr. Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and co-director of Breakthrough Listen, said in a press release. “We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world”.

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