Official leader of Team Mystic.

Last year, the world freaked out over the discovery of a star that was dimming and flickering so erratically, it couldn’t be explained by any known natural phenomenon - prompting one scientist to actually go there and suggest it could be evidence of some kind of alien megastructure.

Follow-up studies have revealed no signs of alien behaviour, but NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope has just spent around 1,600 days observing the star, and things have gotten a lot weirder.

“We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real,” one of the researchers, Ben Montet from Caltetch, told Maddie Stone over at Gizmodo. “We just weren’t able to.”

The results of these latest observations have just gone up on pre-print site arXiv, so other members of the astronomy community can do their best to poke holes in them - which means we can’t read too much into them for now.

But basically what Kepler saw was KIC 8462852, also known as Tabby’s star, dimming at such an incredible rate that it can’t solely be explained by any of the leading hypotheses we had: comet swarms, or the effects of a warped star.

That doesn’t mean we have any more evidence for the alien megastructure hypothesis - the internet-backed idea that an advanced civilisation is building something giant, like a hypothetical Dyson sphere, around the star to harvest its energy.

But what it does suggest is that something’s going on around the star that we’ve never seen anywhere in the cosmos before - most likely a combination of strange phenomena.

everything about you — Albert Camus

rairai

raichu was my first favourite pokemon when I got Blue back in 1997 and I will never, never, ever forget how pumped I was when I got my thunderstone and evolved my first pikachu and what a rush it was!

 My Cat Can Kick Your Dog’s Ass!   Seriously.

Amazing Maine Coon Cats

                                                                𝕀ℂ𝔼

                                                  ᴛʜᴇ

                                     COMPETITION

Clothing swap! It does look a little strange (since I am so used to associating them with their team colors), but it was fun to draw.