A team of citizen scientists known as Planet Hunters identified a mysterious star between the Cygnus and Lyra constellations they could not match to any known object.
Speaking with The Atlantic, Tabetha Boyajian, a postdoctoral student at Yale University, said the strange star stood out because it appeared to be advanced in age, but has various characteristics of a younger one.
"We'd never seen anything like this star," she said. "It was really weird. We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out."
Boyajian, who oversees the Planet Hunters, led a study on the strange star, which she and her team spotted with the Kepler Space Telescope. Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, said he was fascinated by the star once it was brought to his attention.
"When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked," he told The Atlantic. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."
Now the two astronomers are teaming up with Andrew Siemion, the director of the SETI Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, to propose looking at the star with a radio dish in hopes of determining if there are any and what their source is.
"I think it's worthwhile for people to point radio telescopes at the star and check," Wright told NBC News. "It's the best SETI target we have right now."
