Dyson Sphere. Credit Kevin Gill/ Wikimedia Commons
Astronomers discovered potential 7 candidates for Dyson spheres, evidence of alien mega-structures.
Astronomers searched for partially built Dyson spheres and other large structures around stars. They found that such structures would be easy to spot with our telescopes. After a thorough search, they identified seven candidate stars, all white dwarfs.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence uses various techniques and looks across different wavelength bands.
Dyson spheres, large structures that advanced civilizations might build to capture a star’s energy, could be techno-signatures detectable in existing astronomical data.
Researchers searched for partial Dyson spheres by examining optical and infrared data from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE. They created a pipeline with multiple filters and a convolutional neural network to sift through five million objects and identify potential candidates while eliminating false positives. They found 7 promising candidates, all M-dwarfs, with unexplained infrared excesses.
The lead author is Matías Suazo, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University in Sweden. This is the second paper presenting Project Hephaistos.
“In this study, we present a comprehensive search for partial Dyson spheres by analyzing optical and infrared observations from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE,” the authors write. These are large-scale astronomical surveys designed for different purposes.
Each one of them generated an enormous amount of data from individual stars.
“This second paper examines the Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE photometry of ~5 million sources to build a catalog of potential Dyson spheres,” they explain.
source University of Arizona
