Alien Megastructure? Dimming Star May Have Less Exotic Explanation

Last fall, a star named KIC 8462852 made news when scientists found unusual fluctuations in the object's light. But astronomer Tabetha "Tabby" Boyajian of Yale University in Connecticut and her colleagues, along with citizen scientists from the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing program, found something odd. Such analyses raised the possibility that astronomers had detected signs of alien life — specifically, a Dyson sphere, a megastructure built around a star to capture as much of the sun's ene