It will be soon to know if that star actually harbors aliens

When SETI astronomer Doug Vakoch heard the news that there might be an alien civilization around the mysterious star KIC 8462852, he took immediate action.

For the last week, Vakoch and his colleagues at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute have been pointing the ground-based Allen Telescope Array in California at the enigmatic star with one goal in mind.

“We’re trying to rule out the hypothesis that maybe it’s intelligence out there,” Vakoch told Business Insider.

He added that they’re crunching the data in real-time and will, therefore, know if it’s ET within the next week, or so.

Last week, news broke that a bizarre collection of objects unlike anything astronomers have seen before is in orbit around star KIC 8462852. And until more data comes in, speculation is raging that it could be a megastructure in the process of construction by an advanced alien civilization, though astronomers have told Business Insider that the chances of that are “very low.”

“Our assumption is that there’s going to be a natural explanation for this, we just haven’t gotten clever enough to find it,” Vakoch told Business Insider.

Vakoch is the director of Interstellar Message Composition at the SETI Institute with a special interest in how to design outgoing messages that would express what it’s like to be human.

For now, though, Vakoch has all his attention on the Allen Telescope Array (ALA) and what it will find — if anything — around KIC 8462852.

The ALA is a radio telescope that can tune in to 9 billion different frequencies between 1 and 10 GigaHertz. What Vakoch is searching for is a strong signal at a specific frequency, which will tell him that something, or someone, is transmitting from the star’s system.