A distant star, KIC 8462852, has been baffling astronomers from last year due to its strange fluctuations in light. The flickering light of the star, also called ‘Tabby’s Star’, has been forcing scientists to look closely and find what’s obstructing their view.

The far-away star is located some 1,480 light years from us in constellation Cygnus. Some astronomers believe that a cloud of dust or comets could be responsible behind the dimming of light, but there’re few researchers too who have a hunch that the star’s brightness is dimming since last 100 years. Some have another theory, according to which, a huge ‘alien megastructure’ could be responsible for it.

A study has examined the star for about four years and observed that its brightness has dropped consistently. The results are trusted for several astronomers, but they have also raised questions over the pattern of light emitted by the Tabby’s Star.

Researchers of the study used data collected by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope in four years (from 2009 to 2013) and measured light from the mysterious star. During those four years, the star’s light dimmed continuously, as per the study.

At first, there was a slight drop in the light from the distant star, but suddenly, it decreased 2.5% in just 200 days, said astronomers Ben Montet and Joshua Simon, who were part of the team that conducted the study.

To understand more, the researcher compared KIC 8462852 with about 500 stars present in the same area of space. These stars were about the same age of Tabby. According to the researchers, they noticed that none of the 500 stars was having plummet in brightness like Tabby.

“These intriguing new findings suggest that none of the considered phenomena can alone explain the observations. The star doesn't have to abide by our hope for a single explanation. In the end, figuring out this puzzle may require accounting for a combination of effects”, said astronomer Keivan Stassun.

According to a report in IB TIMES by Avaneesh Pandey, "Last fall, a team of scientists led by Tabetha Boyajian from Yale University, who lends the object its informal name, the “Tabby’s star,” reported that the star was not behaving as it should. Based on observations conducted using NASA's Kepler Space Telescope between 2009 and 2013, the team witnessed two unusual incidents, in 2011 and 2013, when the star's light dimmed in dramatic, never-before-seen ways."

However, this is not when Tabby’s star captured the public’s imagination. That happened a month later, in October, when Jason Wright, an astronomer from Penn State University, put forth the idea that the swarm of objects around the star is “something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

“We note these results are apparent in data from each individual detector, not just the combined light curve, suggesting that the decline in flux is an astrophysical effect rather than an instrumental one,” the researchers wrote in the paper.

A report published in NEWS MAX revealed, "A far-away star exhibiting strange fluctuations in its light that's intrigued astronomers for nearly a year has now been found to dimming in just as dramatic a fashion, reports say."

The star, KIC 8462852 — nicknamed "Tabby's Star" after one of its co-founders Tabetha Boyajian — which is 1,480 light-years away and was observed by NASA's Kepler mission, set off speculation last October when Yale scientists found an unusual transit signal, known as a "light curve," Seeker reports.

It was the findings of astronomers Ben Montet from Caltech and and Joshua Simon from the Carnegie Institute — detailing observations of the star since the Kepler space telescope was launched in 2009 — that found yet another surprise, Seeker notes.