Last year, astronomers began to realize a very strange thing going on with one star, called KIC 8462852. It was experiencing massive drops in brightness, and no one knew why.

Theories abounded, including the popular idea that an alien race is building a gigantic superstructure, orbiting the star, that is periodically blocking its light.

Though this idea is not likely, people want to know what's going on. This is why recent discoveries scientists have made, using the Kepler Space Telescope, are so important.

Appearing in a pre-print of a study by Benjamin T. Montet and Joshua D. Simon, there is new evidence that the star has been slowly fading the entire time Kepler has been observing it. This comes, in addition, to the week-long dip in brightness that first made the star famous, and the nine shorter dips that followed.

“Over the first 1,000 days, KIC 8462852 faded approximately linearly at a rate of 0.341 ± 0.041 percent per year, for a total decline of 0.9 percent. KIC 8462852 then dimmed much more rapidly in the next 200 days, with its flux [total light emitted] dropping by more than 2 percent,” the authors report.

Here is a graph, showing the light put out by KIC 8462852 over time

“Kepler was designed to detect and characterize events with timescales of minutes to hours,” the authors note, explaining why these long-term trends were not detected previously. “The part that really surprised me was just how rapid and non-linear it was,” said Montet. “We spent a long time trying to convince ourselves this wasn’t real. We just weren’t able to.”

Still, no one knows exactly what is causing the dip, but now we have some more knowledge about the ongoing dimming that the star is experiencing.

Image Credit NASA/JPL/CALTECH

This is the new information about the mysterious alien megastructure