A strange megastructure that may have been created by an alien civilization has been captured by NASA's Kepler space telescope.
The strange light pattern emanating from star KIC 8462852 has the scientific community in a quandary, USA Today reported.
Hunting for Earth-like planets, Kepler monitors the luminescence of stellar objects and the pattern emanating from the star is far from "normal."
First spotted in 2009, the light pattern suggests there is a "big mess of matter" orbiting the star in tight formation, the Atlantic reported.
According to astronomer Jason Wright from Penn State University the light pattern is uniform with what may appear to be a "swarm of megastructures," he said. "Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build."
"You see all sorts of weird stuff in space," Yale astronomy fellow, Tabetha Boyajian concurred. "But this star was unlike anything we’d ever seen.
"We thought it might be bad data or movement on the spacecraft, but everything checked out.”
If the baffling phenomena continues, scientists plan to position the Very Large Array of radio telescopes in New Mexico to zoom in on star KIC 8462852 in an attempt to solve the mystery.