Dyson Sphere under construction?

[Mr Greene]

KIC 8462852, 
Distance 1276.6 ly
Recorded dips in luminosity of 20-40%, Very large exoplanets usually result in dips of 1-2%
SETI observing for radio signals though none so far detected.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

No.

Boru

[vorlon13]

IIRC, the star R Monocerotis might be an analog of some kind, but is also different in being in a nebula so the sweeping changes in illumination are reflected by the gas cloud.

Or not.


Tabby's star is weird, but maybe not unique. The T Tauri v F thing is concerning . . .

[Cyberman]

Lovely thought, but I doubt it.

[Jackalope]

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say I'm slightly skeptical.

[KUSA]

Where does all the material to manufacture a Dyson sphere come from?

[Fireball]

A small manufacturing plant in North Korea is providing the structural materials and a gazillion square kilometers of aluminum foil.

[Mr Greene]

I was looking into that myself, I recall reading somewhere that it would require material from a number of planetary systems.

It also appears that self replicating robots would be the way to go about it.

 Dyson Swarm consists of thousands of relatively small mirrors or solar panels in an array of orbits around the sun. Like a dense cloud of bees buzzing around a hive, a Dyson Swarm largely shrouds the sun from external view, capturing most of the available solar energy.

• [url=http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/deep/could-we-build-a-dyson-sphere-17110415&media=http://pop.h-cdn.co/assets/cm/15/05/640x400/54cb479848f51_-_dyson-sphere-04-0814-de.jpg&description=Could%20We%20Build%20a%20Dyson%20Sphere%3F%20%20-%20PopularMechanics.com][/url]
  

Steve Bowers/Orion’s Arm Project

A Dyson Swarm, made of thousands of individual units. (Photo Credit: Steve Bowers/Orion's Arm Project)
Armstrong says that a robot-driven manufacturing process could build up a Dyson Swarm in as little as several decades. His plan relies on exponential returns from a virtuous cycle beginning with robots mining material from Mercury. The material is rocketed into orbit (not too tough, given Mercury's weak gravity), then fabricated into an energy-collecting Dyson Swarm unit. The first unit would take a decade to make, be less than a half-square-mile in area, and have "the thickness of tin foil," Armstrong said. This unit would then power an uptick in mining and collector building, and so on. Three more similar cycles would commence, each grander in scale than the last. "It all depends on exponential feedback," Armstrong says.
TRANSMOGRIFIED PLANETS
About half of Mercury's mass—2 sextillion pounds or so—would be usable in the form of the elements oxygen and iron, Armstrong reckons. These elements could be combined to form an iron oxide called hematite, which we humans have used to make mirrors since antiquity. The mirrors could reflect sunlight to power a generator akin to a solar thermal energy plant but adapted for operation in space.
After 40 years of getting worked over, Mercury would be kaput. The small planet would have been converted into a horde of mining and manufacturing robots, powered by fleets of Dyson Swarm solar collectors. Making a full Dyson Swarm that would catch nearly all of the sun's rays, though, would require dismantling perhaps the entire inner solar system—Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. But once engineers have reached this advanced stage, Armstrong says, this prospect wouldn't seem so daunting. Strip-mining Venus would take merely a year given all the available energy and robotics following Mercury's demise.
In devising this Dyson Swarm game plan, Armstrong assumed—conservatively, he thinks—only a one-tenth efficiency for rocketing material off Mercury. The other 90 percent of available energy would go toward mining and processing ore. He assumed further that the mirror and associated generator would reap just a third of the available solar energy, less than some of today's solar concentrator efficiencies.

Apparently the object(s) at KIC 8462852 could have a surface area well over a thousand times that of Earth which would translate into some serious power generation.
It could also indicate that the civilisation has interstellar capabilities, though whether this involved actual beings making the journey or simply robotic resource collectors that could deal with the journey times is another question.

[AFTT47]

Very cool idea but to be scientific, you always have to look for the simplest explanations first. We've been down this route before with the discovery of pulsars (more accurately, neutron stars). When the signals from them were first detected, it was initially thought they might be signals from an extraterrestrial civilization.

I believe the Dyson Sphere idea has merit (in general - not necessarily with this specific star) and I think looking for one is a far better prospect of discovering intelligent life beyond Earth than listening for radio signals. This could be a variation of a Dyson Sphere but science demands skepticism. I think it's far too early to be crying "Dyson Sphere" here. Our knowledge of stellar formation is poor at this point so we can't rule out a natural explanation.

So, maybe but the smart money is on a natural explanation.

[Aoi Magi]

destroyed planet's debris around star can cause similar dips, right?