It turns out that those space 'megastructures' probably weren't created by aliens after all

Monitoring of laser and radio signals from the star by astronomers haven't picked up any kind of unusual messages

The search for alien life could have a bit longer to go (Ye Aung Thu/AFP/Getty Images)

Remember those 'alien megastructures' that scientists apparently found in October? The space anomaly that one astronomer said looked like something "you would expect an alien civilisation to build"?

Unfortunately, after an investigation, it's been found that the mysterious objects orbiting around the catchily-named star KIC 8462852 show no signs of life whatsoever.

The tantalising 'megastructures' theory came to prominence after the Kepler space telescope picked up some unsusual dips in light when observing a star.

When astronomers look for new planets, they search for these brief and small dips in light levels, which can indicate that a planet is passing in front of the star, obscuring its light.

Usually these dips in light levels are under one per cent, but when observing this star, Kepler researchers recorded massive dips of up to 20 per cent, after observing it for more than three years.

Even Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, would only cause a drop of 1 per cent when passing in front of a star, so speculation immediately began as to what the strange phenomenon could be caused by.

As Penn State university astronomer told The Atlantic after the Kepler observations were made public, "Aliens should be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilisation to build. I was fascinated by how crazy it looked."

Such a discovery would doubtless be the most significant in human history, so astronomers contributing to the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) started investigating, observing the star closely with different instruments.

As The Guardian reports, over the course of six nights in late October, astronomers at the Boquete SETI observatory in Panama, which is dedicated to looking for aliens from its high position on the slopes of Panama's tallest mountain, searched the star for laser pulses that appear to be artificially modulated, possibly by alien communications technology.

Unfortunately, they didn't find anything. Scientists from the SETI Institute also used an array of ground-based telescopes to check for radio signals. Even though we obviously wouldn't be able to understand any of these communications, it's easy to tell whether they are altered, deliberate signals, or just naturally-occuring space noise.

Again, the SETI Institute didn't find anything, over the course of more than two weeks' listening.

Another theory that could explain the dips in light suggests they were caused by huge clouds of dust and debris from comets - in the absence of any deliberate signals, this idea seems more likely.

It's probably for the best, anyway. KIC 8462852 is 1,480 lightyears away from Earth, so even if we discovered the structures were made by aliens and we decided to contact them, any signal we could possibly send would take 1,480 years to get there - by which point, it would be likely that the civilisations who sent the messages on both planets would be long dead.