In a May 2023 study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists identified seven potential Dyson sphere candidates among 5 million stars, suggesting advanced alien mega-structures.

In a recent study, researchers identified seven potential Dyson sphere candidates among 5 million stars, suggesting advanced alien mega-structures. Freeman Dyson proposed these structures in 1960.

What would be the most effective way for a developed society to resolve its energy issues? According to renowned British-American physicist Freeman Dyson’s theory, a star would be fully surrounded by a shell composed of mirrors or solar panels that would absorb all of the energy it produces.

In a 1960 study that introduced the idea, Dyson stated, “One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which surrounds its parent star.”

It sounds like science fiction, and for good reason: Olaf Stapledon’s 1937 book “Star Maker” provided the inspiration, and Dyson was never shy about citing it. The late scientist was an emeritus professor at Princeton, New Jersey’s Institute of Advanced Study.

Even though the physicist later clarified that the hypothetical megastructures would consist of “a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star,” the concept took hold and the hypothetical megastructures became known as Dyson spheres, despite coming from a thinker who some in the scientific community say might have been worthy of a Nobel Prize early in his career.

In his study, Dyson also mentioned that Dyson spheres would emit waste heat that might be detected as infrared radiation, and he proposed that a feasible approach to search for extraterrestrial life would be to hunt for that byproduct. He clarified, though, that the presence of infrared radiation alone would not prove the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence, and that the possibility of finding new kinds of naturally occurring astronomical objects was one of the main justifications for looking for such sources.

“Scientists (at the time) were largely receptive, not to the likelihood that alien civilizations would be found to exist, but that a search for waste heat would be a good place to look,” said George Dyson, a technology writer and author and the second of Dyson’s six children, via email. “Science fiction, from ‘Footfall’ to ‘Star Trek,’ took the idea and ran with it, while social critics adopted the Dyson sphere as a vehicle for questioning the wisdom of unlimited technological growth.”

“It would be much more rewarding to search directly for intelligence, but technology is the only thing we have any chance of seeing,” stated the elder Dyson.

Although it was not possible to genuinely search for Dyson spheres in the 1960s, many researchers have recently done so, including those at Fermilab, also known as the National Accelerator Laboratory, and the SETI Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Seven possibilities may be home to Dyson spheres, according to a recent study that examined 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy. This discovery has drawn criticism and the development of competing ideas.

Possibilities

The purpose of the investigation, whose findings were published on May 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, was to look for Dyson spheres, which are thought to be caused by infrared heat around stars that defies explanation.

The research team examined stars that were less than 1,000 light-years away from Earth using historical data from telescopes that detect infrared signatures. “We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible,” explained Matías Suazo, the lead study author and doctoral student in the physics and astronomy department at Uppsala University in Sweden.

“So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don’t know why, so they stand out.”

Suazo issued a warning, saying there is no concrete proof that the seven stars have Dyson spheres surrounding them.

“It’s difficult for us to find an explanation for these sources because we don’t have enough data to prove what is the real cause of the infrared glow,” he said. “They could be Dyson spheres because they behave like our models predict, but they could be something else as well.”

A star’s unfortunate alignment with a background galaxy overlapping it, debris from planetary collisions, or the possibility that the stars are still young and encircled by disks of hot debris from which planets would eventually form are some of the natural explanations for the infrared glow.

The researchers analyzed data from two operational space telescopes: the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and the European Space Agency’s Gaia. They also used data from The Two Micron All Sky Survey, an astronomical survey of the sky in infrared light. The University of Massachusetts and the US Space Agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory collaborated on a project known as 2MASS, which ran from 1997 to 2001.

All of the potential stars are red dwarfs, which are the most prevalent kind of stars in our galaxy. In addition, they are smaller and fainter than our sun, which complicates subsequent observations. Since none of the telescopes that could be able to detect planets in orbit have yet to view the stars, it is unknown at this time if the stars have planets orbiting around them. Nonetheless, the fact that a large number of the hundreds of exoplanets that scientists have discovered so far circle red dwarfs increases the likelihood that they exist; in fact, planets that orbit red dwarfs have a higher probability of supporting life, according to NASA.

Infrared anomalies were also discovered in a sample dataset of 5 million stars in our galaxy by a previous study that was released in March and used data from the same sources as the latest paper.

A job for the Webb space telescope

“We have identified 53 candidates for anomalies that defy explanation, but we cannot conclude that they are all Dyson sphere candidates as that is not our specific focus,” said Gabriella Contardo, the lead researcher of the previous study and postdoctoral research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy. She went on to say that she would compare the prospects to Suazo’s model to determine how many fit into it.

“You need to eliminate all other hypotheses and explanations before saying that they could be a Dyson sphere,” she added. “To do so you need to also rule out that it’s not some kind of debris disk or some kind of planetary collision, and that also pushes the science forward in other fields of astronomy — so it’s a win-win.”

Suazo and Contardo both concur that additional study is required on the data and that since NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is strong enough to see the candidate stars up close, they may eventually go to it for additional information. Securing access, however, may take some time due to the drawn-out, competitive procedures that govern the use of the telescope.

What could be the purpose of Dyson spheres, if they are indeed real? “If you picture ourselves having as much energy as the sun is providing every second, we could do unheard-of things,” Suazo said. “We could do interstellar travel, maybe we could even move the entire solar system to our preferred location if we wanted.”

Don’t hold your breath, though, as humanity is far from possessing the raw resources and technology needed to construct imaginary structures.

“They are so big that everything we have on Earth would not be enough to build them,” Suazo added. “Freeman Dyson said that we should dismantle Jupiter — the whole planet (for the raw materials).”

Given their supercolossal scale, Dyson spheres are most likely extremely uncommon, assuming they exist at all.

According to study coauthor Jason Wright, an astronomy and astrophysics professor at Penn State University, via email, “The importance of this work is that it provides the first strong evidence that there are not a lot of Dyson Spheres in our galaxy, contrary to the expectations of some that they might be an inevitable end-state of technological species’ expansion out into their solar systems.”

“The candidates Matías (Suazo) has found are important because whatever they are — and they are likely stars surrounded by material from some sort of rare event, like a planetary collision, although they could be Dyson spheres — they are rare and interesting objects worthy of further study, for instance by the James Webb Space Telescope.”

Broken spheres

Although his spheres are only one of a dozen concepts bearing his name, Dyson passed away in 2020 before any of them could be located.

“As a young scientist, Dyson showed that three competing quantum theories were the same theory — he summarily ended the competition,” stated William Press, the University of Texas at Austin’s Leslie Surginer Professor of Computer Science and Integrative Biology. He did not participate in the research. “Later, he applied his genius to areas of astronomy, cosmology, the extraterrestrial realm, and also the very real problem of nuclear proliferation here on planet Earth. At the time of his death, he was recognized as a provocative and creative thinker.”

George Dyson attested to his father’s intrigue and all-encompassing influence in a variety of fields.

“Taking advantage of a short attention span and an aversion to bureaucracy, he contributed to five fields of mathematics and eleven fields of physics, as well as to theoretical biology, engineering, operations research, literature, and public affairs,” the younger Dyson said. “Many of his ideas were controversial, with one of his guiding principles being that ‘It is better to be wrong than to be vague.’”

The new study’s methodology may provide a more productive route in the hunt for extraterrestrial intelligence, according to Tomotsugu Goto, an associate professor of astronomy at Taiwan’s National Tsing Hua University. Furthermore, he had no involvement in the study.

“However, contamination by circumstellar debris disks, which mimic Dyson Sphere infrared signatures, remains a concern,” he added in an email. “Authors argue that the debris disks around (dwarf stars) are rare, but the 7 candidate authors selected out of 5 million sources are also rare. Despite this, the seven candidates warrant further investigation with powerful telescopes for a more definitive evaluation.”

In a response to a paper by Suazo and colleagues published on May 23, it is suggested that at least three of the seven stars may have been “misidentified” as Dyson spheres and may instead be “hot DOGs,” or hot dust-obscured galaxies. The remaining four stars could also likely be explained in this manner.

Zaza Osmanov, an associate dean of the School of Physics at the Free University of Tbilisi in Georgia and an affiliate of SETI, who was not involved in the research, believes that the search for Dyson candidates may increase interest in the topic among scientists and young scientists because Suazo’s study touches on the fundamental question of whether humankind is alone in the universe. The search spans different fields, including basic sciences, philosophy, and religion.

The radiation fingerprint of the seven Dyson sphere candidates, he continued, may also be explained by natural events. “The hypothesis of the artificial origin of any, even very interesting, radiation, should be the last springboard when all possible natural explanations are exhausted,” Osmanov said. “And for this, future research is necessary.”

According to George, Dyson’s son, “But the discovery of new, non-technological astronomical phenomena is exactly why he thought we should go out and look.” Dyson himself would also be extremely skeptical that these observations represent a technological signature if he were still living.

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