An international team of scientists from Sweden, India, the US, and the UK has developed a method to search for advanced extraterrestrial megastructures, known as Dyson spheres. A Dyson sphere, a concept proposed by physicist Freeman J. Dyson in 1960, is a hypothetical solar-system-sized structure built to harness the energy of a star, indicating a highly advanced civilization.
The researchers, led by Matías Suazo of Uppsala University in Sweden, have identified seven potential Dyson spheres out of millions of space objects. Their project, named Hephaistos, involved analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey, and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope.
They aimed to detect technosignatures, particularly excess infrared radiation that partially completed Dyson spheres would emit due to waste heat.
“Dyson Sphere” by Kevin M. Gill is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
The team filtered around 5 million sources to compile a catalog of potential Dyson spheres. They looked for objects displaying anomalous infrared excess that could not be attributed to known natural sources, such as nebulae or background galaxies. Through this process, they narrowed the list to 368 sources, further reducing it to seven after excluding blends, irregulars, and nebulae.
These seven candidates are M-type (red dwarf) stars with unexplained infrared excess, which the scientists believe might indicate the presence of Dyson spheres. However, they acknowledge other possible explanations, such as warm debris disks, although these are rare around M-dwarfs.
The researchers emphasize that additional analyses, including follow-up optical spectroscopy, are necessary to confirm the true nature of these sources — They conclude that while their findings are intriguing, further investigation is required to determine whether these candidates are indeed evidence of advanced alien civilizations.
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