(Photo : Wikimedia Commons/NASA/JPL-Caltech)
One star in our galaxy is unique because it flickers as if somebody's playing with its switch. Researchers are hopeful that the study of Boyajian star's strange flickering could help us find the extraterrestrials or the alien civilization.
Strange Boyajian's Star Could Lead Us To Finding Alien Civilization?
Oxford University astrophysicist Prof Chris Lintott made a public lecture about aliens and the unusual star at a Gresham College lecture in Conway Hall, central London on April 29. His main target Was Boyajian's star in the constellation Cygnus, often known as Tabby's star after astronomer Tabetha Boyajian.
Space probes and observatories have been closely examining this star's peculiar fading and brightening in recent years. Lintott said the star's behavior was "extraordinary." Its brightness abruptly decreases and then rises in quick, erratic spurts. It doesn't follow any pattern and it is the only one of its kind in our galaxy.
When Boyajian's star's unpredictable behavior was initially discovered in 2012, the Kepler Space Observatory examined it in great detail. These measurements suggested that a massive amount of stuff is periodically blocking the star's light and circling it tightly.
Theories about the bizarre star included swarms of asteroids, dust rings, and disintegrating comets. The Penn State University scientists' suggestion that the eclipsing mass might be a massive alien megastructure, however, garnered the most attention.
Physicist Freeman Dyson suggested such structures, speculating that certain extraterrestrial societies might be developed enough to erect enormous solar panel arrays around their home stars in order to harness the heat and light from them. These far-off civilizations would be powered by the massive circling structures, which astronomers dubbed Dyson spheres or swarms.
According to Lintott, they have discovered that different wavelengths of light are blocked to varying degrees, which is just what one would anticipate from starlight traveling through a cloud of dust. Boyajian's eclipsing mass is most likely a dust cloud created when a planet struck it too closely and broke apart.
However, Lintott noted that the analysis of the weird object is significant because it draws attention to methods that will become more crucial in the years to come as efforts to identify extraterrestrial civilizations get more intense.
Alien Civilization Might Have Been Destroyed
While the search for extraterrestrials continues, another physicist shared a "morbid" theory -- that they probably no longer exist. Astronomy professor Dr. Frederick Walter suggested that a massive "supernova" of radiation called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) may have wiped off the alien civilization.
Gamma-ray bursts are "the most powerful class of explosions in the universe." The light produced by a typical burst is one quintillion, or one plus nineteen zeros, times that of the sun. It has more than enough energy to wipe out any alien civilization in its own galaxy.
It turned out that supernova occurrences were, in fact, much more common in younger, distant galaxies that were still forming stars or, in the case of long-duration GRBs, converting collapsing stars to black holes.
A gamma-ray burst occurs roughly every 100 million years in any galaxy, according to Dr. Walter, who has spoken on the search for extraterrestrial life at Stony Brook University in New York. He added that it would be reasonable to anticipate that this explosion would wipe out a number of civilizations, should they exist.
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