This is not a drill: NASA’s Kepler Telescope has found something literally and figuratively out of this world — and it could have major implications for us Earthlings.
Well, maybe. But let’s backtrack a little.
According to The Atlantic, since 2009, the Kepler Telescope has been observing an “unusual star” that’s located between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations in our big ol’ Milky Way Galaxy.
Very smart people suggest that the light pattern this star is emitting is highly unusual: “The light pattern suggests there is a big mess of matter circling the star, in tight formation,” The Atlantic reports.
Of about 150,000 stars that Kepler has been studying, none of them emitted the same pattern and now, scientists are looking for answers.


Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoc at Yale who has observed this particular light pattern, recently wrote a paper considering the “natural” explanations for the strange occurrence. However, she told The Atlantic that there were “’other scenarios’ she was considering.”
Boyajian shared info about the whacky light pattern with Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University. He’s working on a paper of his own about it — a different explanation.
“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright said. “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”
Per The Atlantic, “Boyajian is now working with Wright and Andrew Siemion, the Director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley. The three of them are writing up a proposal. They want to point a massive radio dish at the unusual star, to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies associated with technological activity.” The group hopes to kick off its observations in January.
So, is this truly an “Alien Megastructure,” an error with the telescope, or just a glitch in The Matrix? Only time will tell. Hopefully our galactic companions are cool and not tyrannical dirtbags like the ones in “Signs.”