At first thought you might think a computer could be programmed to find something like this star.  Here is why they disagree:

Computers spot most of the promising planet candidates in the data, but this star would have fallen through the cracks if volunteer citizen scientists had not flagged its unusual signature. “This wouldn’t have been picked up by a computer algorithm,” says Yale University astronomer Tabetha Boyajian, who manages the Planet Hunters crowdsourcing project to analyze Kepler’s data. “We weren’t looking for something like this.”

The volunteers’ human eyes noticed that the light from KIC 8462852 sometimes got fainter by as much as 20 percent.

Apparently they don’t think an algorithm could have noticed the amount of dimming.  What do you think?  Feel free to comment with your ideas.

thanks to scientificamerican.com for the great info

thanks to NASA for the pic