SETI Institute Undertakes Search for Alien Signal from Kepler Star KIC 8462852

“We either caught something shortly after an event like two planets crashing together or alien intelligence,” said Dr. Gerald Harp, senior scientist at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, referring to thebaffling light variations seen by the Kepler Observatory in the star KIC 8462852 .

And he and a team from the Institute are working hard at this moment to determine which of the two it is.

Beginning last Friday (Oct. 16), the Institute’s Allen Telescope Array (ATA) was taken off its normal survey schedule and instead focused on KIC 8462852, one of the 150,000-plus stars studied by NASA’s Kepler Mission to detect Earth-sized exoplanets orbiting distant stars.. The array of 42 dishes comprises a fully automated system that can run day and night, alerting staff whenever an unusual or interesting signal has been detected.

A swarm of comets has been proposed to explain the erratic and non-repeating light variations seen in the star located nearly 1,500 light years from Earth in the constellation Cygnus the Swan. But no one really seems satisfied with the explanation, and the chances that we’d catch a huge event like a comet breakup or planetary collision in the short time the star has been under observation seems unlikely. Collisions also generate dust. Warmed by the star, that dust would glow in infrared light, but none beyond what’s expected has been detected.

The Allen Telescope Array (ATA) is a “Large Number of Small Dishes” (LNSD) array designed to be highly effective for simultaneous surveys undertaken for SETI projects (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) at centimeter wavelengths. Credit: Seth Shostak / SETI Institute

The ATA picks up radio frequencies in the microwave range from 1-10 gigahertz. For comparison, your kitchen microwave oven produces microwaves at around 2 gigahertz. Although Harp couldn’t reveal the team’s results yet — that will come soon when a paper is submitted in few weeks in a science journal — he did share the excitement of a the hunt in a phone interview Tuesday.