Clearly, the hot word was megastructure. “Astronomers may have found giant alien ‘megastructures’ orbiting star near the Milky Way,” proclaimed The Independent last October. “The strange star that has serious scientists talking about an alien megastructure,” echoed the Washington Post. Even the Daily Mail used the “megastructure” word. The basic observation was a bit more prosaic, if no less exciting to astronomers. Since 2009, the Kepler Space Telescope has been focused at the same patch of the Milky Way, observing 150,000 stars over and over again to look for tiny variations in their brightness. These fluctuations can, famously, be evidence of planets blotting out a tiny bit of starlight in a regular pattern; the size o