--- title: We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star? | TIME description: An unusual field of debris around a distant star has astronomers stumped, and some think it could be aliens. canonical: https://time.com/video/Jto5ONK1/ og:title: We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star? og:description: An unusual field of debris around a distant star has astronomers stumped, and some think it could be aliens. og:url: https://time.com/video/Jto5ONK1/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Jto5ONK1/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star? twitter:description: An unusual field of debris around a distant star has astronomers stumped, and some think it could be aliens. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Jto5ONK1/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star? > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star? [Watch (HLS stream): We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star?](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Jto5ONK1.m3u8) (1:37)  _Published 2015-10-16. An unusual field of debris around a distant star has astronomers stumped, and some think it could be aliens._ --- Jul 27, 2023 6:59 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Insider Scoop: Alien - Isolation](/video/if49IEkO/) ### Insider Scoop: Alien - Isolation [Fred Tatasciore - Alien Voice](/video/TT7HuhUZ/) ### Fred Tatasciore - Alien Voice [TIME Explains: Could We Be Aliens?](/video/klUn8B3a/) ### TIME Explains: Could We Be Aliens? --- ## Transcript Nearly 1, 500 lightyears from Earth, there is a star with the catchy name KIC 8462852 and scientists are trying to figure out what it's deal is. In 2011, Astronomers picked up some weird readings which suggested there is an unusual amount of debris orbiting the star, different sized chunks moving at different speeds, when a star is young it's usually surrounded by such debris but this star doesn't appear to be young. This has some scientist suggesting aliens. Jason Right as Penn State University told the Atlantic aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you can consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build. Wright thinks it could be some kind of swarm of megastructures orbiting the sun. And while no scientists have mentioned the Dyson sphere by name, it sounds a lot like what is being described. Freeman Dyson first proposed the concept in the 1960s. A Dyson sphere is a group of megastructures built around a star to harvest its energy. Such an engineering task would pretty much require an advanced civilization. There are of course, more mundane possibilities In here paper published about the [ UNKNOWN ] Tabitha [ UNKNOWN ] puts forward a few hypothesis and finds each lacking except for one. It's possible that a star passed through the system pulling comets inwards as it did so. [ UNKNOWN ] told new scientists we were scratching our heads for any idea that came up there was always something that would argue against it. Boyajian hopes to know more soon. If things go well, astronomers will be pointing a massive radio telescope at the star by sometime in January to listen for radio waves, which are considered a good indicator of intelligent life. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"We're Not Saying It's Aliens, But What Is With This Star?","description":"An unusual field of debris around a distant star has astronomers stumped, and some think it could be aliens.","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/Jto5ONK1/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2015-10-16T17:09:36.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Jto5ONK1.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/Jto5ONK1/","duration":"PT1M37S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/Jto5ONK1/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```