Stephen Hawking’s £80m alien-hunting project to investigate mysterious ‘megastructure’ star

Stephen Hawking’s £80m ‘Breakthrough Listen’ project is to investigate a star which some think is orbited by an alien ‘megastructure’ - a Death Star-style mega-spaceship, sucking up its energy.

The star, KIC 8462852, also known as ‘Tabby’s Star’, dims by 22%, sometimes for months at a time in data from NASAs Kepler telescope - and no one knows why.

Now astronomers will turn one of the world’s most powerful radio telescopes - the Green Bank Observatory Telescope -to watch it.

Andrew Siemon, co-director of Breakthrough Listen, said: ‘We can look at it with greater sensitivity and for a wider range of signal types than any other experiment in the world.’

Breakthrough Listen will tune in for eight hours per night every three nights over the next two months - part of a 10-year effort to find aliens.

Alien fans believe that the star is orbited by Death Star-style mega-spaceships which orbit stars to suck up their energy.

Earlier this year, researchers Josh Simon of Carnegie and Ben Monte of Caltech say that the star has also faded slowly and steadily during the four years it was watched by NASA’s Kepler space telescope.

The find makes it even more difficult to explain why the star is dimming in and brightening in such a way - unless it really IS aliens.