The KIC 8462852 star was first spotted by online astronomers Planet Hunters in 2015, which appeared to be dipping in brightness.
Astronomers struggled to explain why the star’s brightness was constantly fluxuating, leading some to believe an advanced alien civilisation had built a megastructure, or Dyson Sphere, around it to harbour its energy.
Top scientists were keen to rule out aliens and opted instead to look for a more natural explanation, such as comets passing in-between Earth and the star – colloquially known as Tabby’s Star after its discoverer Tabetha Boyajian – but this has since been ruled out.
However, experts may have found the real reason and it is a much simpler expectation than previously thought.
Mario Sucerquia and his colleagues at the University of Antioquia in Colombia believe that the varying degrees of dimming could be caused by a huge Saturn-like ringed planet orbiting the star.
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They believe some of the rings would initially block out the light, before the huge planet blocks out more.
As the planet would be at a tilt – like Saturn – the dips in brightness would be irregular, according to simulations the experts ran.
To test this, Mr Sucerquia and colleagues simulated a light curve from a ringed planet orbiting a star at about one tenth the distance that Earth orbits the sun.
They found that not only is the light irregular, but the star would actually tug on the rings, causing them to wobble, adding to the inconsistency of the light pattern.
Additionally, the planet would only need to have a mass equivalent to Neptune.
Mr Sucerquia told New Scientist: “The point of this work is to show the community that there are mechanisms that can alter the light curves.
“These changes can be generated by the dynamics of the moons or the rings, and the changes in these systems can occur in such short scales as to be detected in just a few years.”