Tabby's Star

I'm writing this to show how astronomical observations can be interpreted in different ways.

The observations in question are of KIC 8462852, an F-class star in the Cygnus constellation. This star is a main sequence star, meaning that it's stable and fusing hydrogen into helium. The Kepler space telescope was used to monitor this star over a period od several years. The Kepler telescope is out in space and its main function is to hunt for planets orbiting nearby stars. In this case the star is 1,280 light years away and what made everyone take notice is that the dimming of the star was irregular. In fact it was outrageous.
This star is called Tabby's star because of the astronomer who worked on this project. Her name is Tabetha S. Boyajian. It's also called the WTF star, but you know what that abreviation means.

Normally, when a large planet passes in front of star it causes a dimming of the star's light. The dimming is only in the 1-2% range for most cases and the dimming only lasts a few hours. In the case of Tabby's star, the star's light dimmed up to 15% and these dimming events were not periodic and unexpected. In other words they appeared to be random. They also exhibited an unusual brightness curve. There was a slower dip at the onset and a more abrupt jump back up at the end. The problem is that this is not normal for a planetary transit across the star.

The first thought was this anomaly was caused by a large group of disintegrating comets passing in front of the star even though this didn't make sense. When other astronomers and the public caught news of this, the speculation was that this was sign of intelligent life. They theorized that a technologically advance race had constructed a mega structure in the form of a Dyson sphere around the star to more efficiently collect the star's energy.
Of course, if an intelligent alien race had constructed a Dyson sphere it would be a mega structure beyond anything we could ever hope to create. It would take a very long time and require mega tons of material. The engineering would be out of this world, literally!

The fact is that these observations have been duplicated using other telescopes around the Earth. However, SETI radio telescopes have failed to detect any sort of intelligent signal from this star. Also, another star, EPIC 204278916, has also exhibited similar dips in brightness similar to those of Tabby's star. Now, one super advanced alien civilization would be possible, more than one is not reasonable. All of this points to a more natural cause for these dips.

My take on this is that it's very interesting but not positive proof for intelligent alien life. This kind of unusual observation needs more work to determine its real cause.

Thanks for reading.