Scientists have discovered 60 stars that appear to show signs of gigantic alien power plants
A survey of five million distant solar systems, aided by ‘neural network’ algorithms, has discovered 60 stars that appear to be surrounded by giant alien power stations.
According to the astronomers, seven of these stars – so-called M dwarf stars that range between 60 and 8 percent the size of our Sun – have given off unexpectedly high infrared ‘heat signatures’.
Natural and better understood “phenomena” in space, as they report in their new study, “cannot easily explain the observed excess infrared radiation.”
Since theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the idea at Princeton in 1960, astrophysicists have speculated that advanced aliens might have built enormous solar energy collectors around one or more stars.
While powering their spacefaring alien civilizations, these hypothetical ‘Dyson spheres’ would reveal themselves by radiating more heat than normal, the physicist argued.
A survey of five million distant solar systems, aided by ‘neural networks’, has discovered 60 stars that appear to be surrounded by giant alien power stations. Such ‘Dyson spheres’ that collect solar energy, physicists claim, would reveal themselves by radiating more heat than normal
Astrophysicists and planetary scientists call “Dyson spheres” and other similar concepts “technosignatures,” or simply signs of technology in the universe.
Technosignatures can range from these incredible feats of engineering to more humiliating signs, such as technologically induced pollution – including nitrogen dioxide gas from combustion exhaust or the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that once threatened Earth’s ozone layer years ago, both detectable through telescopes light-years away.
Two teams of astronomers, led by Matías Suazo of Uppsala University in Sweden and Gaby Contardo of the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy, conducted the final search for the telling infrared data that could reveal a distant ‘Dyson sphere’ .
The researchers merged data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope and the ground-based infrared survey telescope MASS2.
While there may be other explanations for the excess infrared signatures they found, Suazo noted, “The most fascinating explanation could be real Dyson bulbs.”
In their hunt for ‘Dyson spheres’, the researchers merged data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope and the ground-based infrared telescope MASS2. Above, stars that could have alien power plants
Suazo’s group in Sweden found that seven red M dwarf stars, each located no more than 900 light-years from Earth, appeared to produce as much as 60 times more infrared heat than would be expected based on their size.
For each red dwarf star, they calculated how much of its radiation would have to be blocked by a possible energy-harvesting technology to produce the measured ratio of infrared heat versus visible light.
The values ranged from 3 percent to 16 percent opacity for the seven unusual stars they identified.
“This doesn’t look like a single solid shell around the star,” one member of Suazo’s team, astrophysicist Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, told New scientist.
In other words, if these stars were surrounded by alien power plants, they would likely be a variant of the all-encompassing Dyson sphere, also known as a “Dyson swarm.”
Such a swarm could be in the form of a large fleets of satellites, which would orbit these stars as a way to collect energy.
“Additional analyzes are absolutely necessary to reveal the true nature of these sources,” the team wrote in their study, published this month in the journal Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
If the stars turn out to be surrounded by alien power plants, the researchers said, they would likely be a variant of the all-encompassing Dyson sphere called a ‘Dyson swarm’ (pictured above)
A Dyson shower could take the form of a large fleet of satellites orbiting these stars as a way of gathering energy – and would only partially cover the star (as illustrated above), unlike the large shell of the classical, original Dyson bulb concept
The findings from Contardo’s group in Italy were broader, using a different machine-learning computer model to look for infrared ‘technosignatures’ of Dyson spheres, partial spheres or swarms.
They identified 53 candidates, including strange infrared heat around a few larger Sun-like stars, at a distance beyond Suazo’s team’s candidate stars: up to 6,500 light-years from Earth.
“A few of those objects appear to be young stars,” Contardo’s group acknowledged their studies; the young stars would likely project infrared as they heated clouds of debris and not yet fully formed planets in their equally young solar system.
While Contardo said both her and the group’s star candidates were “interesting,” she conceded that astronomers and other scientists will need “follow-up observations to confirm anything.”
Suazo’s group suggested that a useful next step would be optical spectroscopy, a technique that has separated interesting older stars from the younger stars that were historically surrounded by debris and “protoplanets.”