Remember back in September when everyone suddenly went berserk for "alien megastructures"? Scientists in charge of the Kepler spacecraft announced that they had spotted something odd around the star KIC 8462852. They found that its brightness was fluctuating. Now, this is pretty normal behaviour for stars with planets orbiting them, as the planet temporarily blocks the light as it moves in front of its host, but the fluctuations of KIC 8462852 weren't consistent with a planet, this was something bigger. Something that they might have been consistent with, however, was some kind of alien megastructure like a Dyson Sphere - a kind of giant solar panel used to harvest the sun's energy. Unfortunately, despite the fact that scientists aren't quite ready to rule this theory out, we haven't so far discovered any other signs of life around KIC 8462852, most likely to be in the form of infrared radiation. Alas, according to new research, it seems more likely that the irregular dimming of the star's brightness is probably due to a family of comets with a dramatically eccentric orbit. So, not quite the discovery people were hoping for, but a discovery nonetheless. However "It's Probably Just Rocks" is a slightly less exciting headline that "Scientists Discover Alien Megastructure", so the media interest just sort of fizzled out.
