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There are countless stars in the universe. There may be around one hundred billion stars just in our Milky Way galaxy alone.
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But the single strangest one that we've discovered so far is a pretty close one to home, known officially as
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KIC 8 4 6 2 8 5 2, it's only a little larger than the Sun is, and is only located about
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1280 light-years away from us. It's been known to humanity for quite some time,
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but always remained relatively obscure until recent observations noticed something strange back in 2015.
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It seemed like KIC 8 4 6 2 8 5 2 was getting dimmer, and nobody really understood
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why. Researchers became aware in 2015 that back in March of 2011,
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recordings made by the Kepler space telescope
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indicated that the star's brightness was reduced by up to 15%, and by February 2013,
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it's brightness had been reduced by up to 22%. The star continued to dim and brighten again,
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which suggested that something enormous was orbiting around it. For
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comparison, a planet the size of Jupiter would only obscure the star by just 1%.
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This indicated that whatever was blocking the light from the star wasn't a planet,
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but something way bigger,
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covering up to half of the entire width of the star. In addition to these day-long dimming and brightenings, a study of a
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century's worth of photographic plates dating between 1890 and 1998
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suggested that the star's brightness had gradually faded by 20% in that time, an amount
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unprecedented by any other known star of this size and type.
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Speculation began to run rampant about what was causing the star to fade,
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And one of the more interesting theories was that we were witnessing the construction of a giant alien
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mega-structure called a dyson sphere. In a paper written back in 1960 by Freeman Dyson titled, "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation"
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Dyson suggested that any other technological civilization in the universe would likely follow a similar power consumption pattern to that of humans.
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Since humanity's energy needs have been continuously growing year by year,
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It's possible that eventually we'll need more energy than what we can produce on earth, so, the logical end step for maximum energy
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harvesting is to harvest it directly from the Sun from one of three different types of Dyson spheres.
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Type one is to build a ring of orbiting structures around the star that collect light and wirelessly transfer the energy back to the home planet.
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A type two is to build a bubble of satellites around the star that absorbs a good percentage of the light,
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but not all of it. And a type three is to completely swallow the star with a solid shell of matter that absorbs
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100% of the energy and light that the star
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produces. If a sphere like this was built around the Sun with a radius of one au, the spheres surface area would be
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550 million times the surface area of Earth, and it would produce a ridiculous 384.6
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Yottawatts of energy, about 33 trillion times the entire energy consumption of all of humanity in
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1998
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Access to such an enormous amount of energy would essentially make any civilization that harnessed it appear to us to be as powerful as Gods.
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We don't know what exactly would be possible; it would kind of be like showing
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paleolithic people what a nuclear reactor would be capable of doing.
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Freeman Dyson speculated that any civilization in space that got advanced enough would eventually build one of these types of structures,
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which meant that in theory, we could detect their presence by observing a massive dip in light, sort of like
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what was happening with KIC 8 4 6 2 8 5 2.
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However, Dyson also believes that most known
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substances that would make up a Dyson Sphere would be re-radiating energy in the infrared part of the electromagnetic
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spectrum, which was not being detected with our mysterious star. In 2016, the lead researcher into the light
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irregularities of the star said in a now famous TED talk that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,
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and it is my job, my responsibility, as an astronomer to remind people that alien
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hypotheses should always be a last resort. To further add to the mystery though, the SETI Institute concluded that whatever
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material is blocking the light between us and the star is
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located inside the star's habitable zone,
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where life like ours would be possible. The craziest theory is that we may be currently observing a gigantic
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interplanetary space battle that included the apocalyptic destruction of a planet that generated dust obscuring the light from the star.
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Seriously, all natural explanations were turning up weak, until a recent study was concluded just last month in January 2018.
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More than 1,700 people donated over
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$100,000 to fund the study, which concluded that the most likely culprit blocking the star's light was just
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dust. The data showed that different colors of light were being blocked at different intensities,
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which meant that whatever is passing between us and the star isn't opaque,
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which is what would be expected from either a planet or an alien
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mega-structure
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If it is dust though, it's still not entirely clear
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why that much would be in the system though in the first place.
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Considering that it doesn't appear to be a young star system, dust should have coalesced into a series of planets by now,
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which is yet another part of the puzzle
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surrounding KIC 8 4 6 2 8 5 2.
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There is still work that needs to be done in finding answers out about this star. We still can't say for certain
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what exactly is going on. But what I can't say for certain is how to get a free audio book.
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