The definitive solution for energy problems of an advanced civilization would be a structure composed of mirrors or solar panels completely surrounding a star, taking advantage of all the energy that it produces. Renowned British-American physicist Freeman Dyson theorized this.
“It must be expected that, within a few thousand years after entering the phase of industrial development, any intelligent species will be found occupying an artificial biosphere completely surrounding its parent star,” Dyson wrote in a 1960 paper in which he explained the concept for the first time.
If it sounds like science fiction, that’s because it is: Dyson got the idea from Olaf Stapledon’s novel “Star Maker,” published in 1937, and has always been open about it. The late scientist was professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Still, coming from a thinker who some in the scientific community believe could have been worthy of a Nobel Prize early in his career, the concept gained traction and the hypothetical megastructures became known as Dyson Spheres, although the physicist later clarified that they would consist of “a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling in independent orbits around the star.”
In his paper Freeman also noted that Dyson Spheres would emit detectable waste heat as infrared radiation and suggested that searching for this byproduct would be a viable method for searching for extraterrestrial life. However, he added that these waves, by themselves, would not necessarily indicate extraterrestrial intelligence and that one of the strongest reasons to look for such sources was the possibility of discovering new types of natural astronomical objects.
“Scientists (at the time) were largely receptive, not to the likelihood that alien civilizations existed, but that a search for waste heat would be a good starting point,” said George Dyson, technology writer and author, and the second of Dyson’s six children, via email. “Science fiction, from ‘Footfall’ to ‘Star Trek,’ has taken the idea and run with it, while social critics have embraced the Dyson Sphere as a vehicle for questioning the wisdom of limitless technological growth.”
Dyson himself argued: “It would be much more rewarding to look directly for intelligence, but technology is the only thing we have any chance of seeing.”
In the 1960s, there was no way to actually search for Dyson Spheres, but in more recent times many researchers have looked for them, including those at the SETI Institute, a nonprofit organization with a mission to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, known as Fermilab.
Now, a new study that analyzed five million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially be hosting Dyson Spheres — a discovery that is attracting scrutiny and alternative theories.
Possibilities
The authors of the study published on May 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Societyspecifically set out to look for Dyson Spheres in the form of near-infrared heat from stars that could not be explained otherwise.
Using historical data from telescopes that capture infrared radiation signals, the research team analyzed stars located less than 1,000 light years from Earth: “We started with a sample of five million stars and applied filters to try to eliminate as much contamination as possible from the data,” said the study’s lead author, Matías Suazo, a doctoral candidate in the department of physics and astronomy 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.” There is no conclusive evidence that the seven stars have Dyson Spheres around them, Suazo cautioned.
“It’s difficult for us to find an explanation for these sources because we don’t have enough data to prove what the real cause of the infrared glow is,” he said. “They could be Dyson Spheres, because they behave as our models predict, but they could also be something else.”
Natural causes that could explain the infrared glow include an unfavorable alignment in observation, with a background galaxy overlapping the star, planetary collisions creating debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris from which planets would later form.
The researchers used data from two active space telescopes — NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or Wise, and the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia — as well as an astronomical survey of the sky in infrared light called Two Micron All Sky Survey, known as 2MASS. This collaboration between the University of Massachusetts and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory took place between 1997 and 2001.
The candidate stars are all red dwarfs, the most common type in our galaxy. They are also fainter and smaller than our Sun, which makes follow-up observations more difficult. It is unclear at this time whether the stars have planets around them, as they have not yet been observed by any of the telescopes that could potentially detect planets in orbit.
However, many of the thousands of exoplanets identified so far orbit red dwarfs, making their presence likely; Planets orbiting them have a greater chance of being habitable, according to NASA.
Using a previous study published in March and data from the same sources as the new report, infrared anomalies were also found among a dataset of five million stars in our galaxy.
A job for the James Webb Telescope
“We identified 53 candidates with anomalies that cannot be well explained, but we cannot say that they are all candidates for Dyson spheres, because that is not what we are specifically looking for,” said Gabriella Contardo, a postdoctoral researcher at the International School of Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, who led the previous study. She added that she plans to check candidates against Suazo’s model to see how many fit it.
“You need to eliminate all other hypotheses and explanations before saying they could be a Dyson sphere,” he added. “To do that, you also have to rule out that it’s not some kind of debris disk, or some planetary collision, which also drives science in other fields of astronomy — so it’s a win-win.”
Both Contardo and Suazo agree that more research is needed on the data and that they could ultimately turn to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope for more information, as it is powerful enough to directly observe the candidate stars. However, due to the lengthy and competitive procedures regulating telescope use, it may take some time to secure access.
If Dyson Spheres truly exist, their potential use would be truly revolutionary. Matías Suazo speculates about the enormous benefits that could be obtained if we could capture and use all the energy that the Sun produces every second. “If we imagine having as much energy as the Sun is providing every second, we could do unimaginable things,” Suazo said. “We could undertake interstellar travel, perhaps even move the entire solar system to our preferred location, if we wanted.”
However, Suazo and other experts warn that building Dyson Spheres is a colossal task beyond humanity’s current technological capabilities. The structures would be so large that the raw materials needed for their construction would be unobtainable with the resources available on Earth.
“They are so big that everything we have on Earth wouldn’t be enough to build them,” Suazo added. “Freeman Dyson said we should dismantle Jupiter — the entire planet (to obtain the necessary raw materials).”
This super colossal scale suggests that if Dyson Spheres do exist, they are extremely rare.
“The importance of this work is that it provides the first solid evidence that there are not many Dyson Spheres in our galaxy, contrary to the expectations of some that they could be an inevitable end state of the expansion of technological species out of their systems. solar systems,” study co-author Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, said in an email.
The candidates found by Matías Suazo are rare and intriguing objects, regardless of whether they are Dyson Spheres or not. They are worthy of additional study, especially through the James Webb Space Telescope, for a more definitive assessment.
Despite the challenges and uncertainties involved in the search for Dyson Spheres, the researchers’ approach could pave the way for significant progress in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. “However, contamination by circumstellar debris disks, which mimic the infrared signatures of Dyson Spheres, remains a concern,” noted Tomotsugu Goto, associate professor of astronomy at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan.
A paper published on May 23 in response to the study by Suazo and his colleagues suggests that at least three of the seven stars were “incorrectly identified” as Dyson Spheres and could actually be “hot DOGs.” , in Portuguese) — hot galaxies obscured by dust — and that the other four could probably be explained in the same way.
Because Suazo’s study touches on the fundamental question of whether humanity is alone in the Universe, the search for Dyson candidates spans different fields — including basic sciences, philosophy and religion — and could therefore increase young scientists’ involvement and interest. of the scientific world on the topic, according to Zaza Osmanov, affiliated with Seti and deputy dean of the School of Physics at the Free University of Tbilisi, in Georgia, who was not involved in the research.
However, he added that the radiation signature of the seven Dyson Spheres candidates could also be explained by natural phenomena. “The hypothesis of the artificial origin of any radiation, even very interesting, should be the last springboard when all possible natural explanations have been exhausted,” said Osmanov. “And for this, future research is needed.”
As for Dyson, if he were alive, his son George argues that he would also be extremely skeptical that these observations represented a technological signature: “But the discovery of new, non-technological astronomical phenomena is exactly why he thought we should go out and look. ”
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