Those ‘Alien Megastructures’ Are Probably Just Dust
New data suggest a very natural explanation for what’s happening around the “most mysterious star in the universe.”
In 2015, The Atlantic first reported that astronomers had discovered some tantalizing information about a distant star in the Milky Way, located about 1,300 light-years from Earth in a swan-shaped constellation called Cygnus. The star itself, slightly bigger than our sun, seemed pretty ordinary as far as stars in the universe go. But every now and then, the light of the star appeared to dim and brighten.
This wasn’t the weird part. Astronomers look for faint dips in brightness in their search for exoplanets around other stars all the time. The dimming means that something is passing in front of a star and blocking some light from reaching Earth. Telescope observations have discovered thousands of
