Between the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra sits an uncommon star, which the naked eye can’t see, but the Kepler Space Telescope has been watching for about six years.

The Kepler telescope searches for Earth-like planets in the Milky Way and has located over a thousand planets since its 2009 launch, . It keeps track of the brightness of stars and looks for little dips in light patterns that indicate an orbiting planet.

The best method for watching the star requires the human eye, which is unsurpassed when it comes to certain kinds of pattern recognition, . However, the science team monitoring Kepler collected so much light that they could not process all the algorithms. To remedy this, Kepler’s astronomers founded the program , which asks “citizen scientists” to examine the light patterns emitted by stars from their homes.

This photo shows the mysterious star KIC 8462852 that is being monitored by the Kepler Space Telescope.

(Screenshot via WPXI - Pittsburgh)

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In 2011, several of the citizen scientists that was emitting a light pattern stranger than any of the others Kepler was watching. Its pattern suggests that there is a large cluster of matter circling it in a tight formation, which would be expected if the star were young. When stars are young, they are surrounded by dust that give off extra infrared light. This particular star appears to be mature.

Named , the star emits a particular light pattern that across 150,000 stars.

“You see all sorts of weird stuff in space, but you start to recognize general patterns and can attribute certain shapes of light curves to different phenomena, but this star was unlike anything we’d ever seen,” Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale, .

In September she describing the strange light patterns of the star, with several of the citizen scientists listed as co-authors. It explores multiple scenarios explaining the pattern, such as instrument defects or a pileup of shrapnel from an asteroid belt, but none of the explanations seem to fit.

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When speaking with Ross Anderson of The Atlantic, Boyajian explained her paper reviewed only “natural” scenarios, however she said there were “other scenarios” she was taking into consideration, such as the possibility of extraterrestrial civilization. An of the light pattern will be published by Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked,” Wright . “Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.” In the past,SETI researchers have suggested that distant extraterrestrial civilizations may be detected by looking for technological artifacts orbiting other stars.

Boyajian has teamed up with Wright and Andrew Siemion, director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to . Their intent is to focus a massive radio dish at the star to see if it emits radio waves at frequencies that are associated with technological activity. Upon seeing a significant amount of waves, they’ll follow up with the Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico, which may tell whether they came from a technological source, such as those that enter the universe from Earth’s radio stations.

The first observation would take place in January, with a follow-up in the fall, or even sooner if things went particularly well.

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“The Milky Way Over Turret Arch” submitted by Ron Risman