A study of five million distant solar systems, with the help of “neural network” algorithms, has discovered 60 stars that appear to be surrounded by giant alien power plants.
According to astronomers, seven of the stars, so-called M dwarf stars, which range between 60 and 8 percent the size of our Sun, were recorded as emitting unexpectedly high infrared “heat signatures.”
The natural and better understood “phenomena” of outer space, as they report in their new study, “cannot easily explain the observed excess infrared emission.”
Since theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the idea at Princeton in 1960, astrophysicists have speculated that advanced aliens could have built enormous solar energy collectors around a star or more.
As they propelled their ET civilizations on space travel, these hypothetical ‘Dyson spheres’ would be revealed to radiate more heat than usual, the physicist argued.
A study of five million distant solar systems, with the help of “neural networks”, has discovered 60 stars that appear to be surrounded by giant alien power plants. According to physicists, these “Dyson spheres” that collect solar energy would reveal themselves to radiate more heat than usual.
Astrophysicists and planetary scientists call “Dyson spheres” and other similar concepts “technosignatures,” or simply signs of technology in the universe.
Technological signatures can range from these incredible feats of engineering to more humbling signs, such as technologically generated pollution, including nitrogen dioxide from combustion exhaust gases or chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that once threatened the ozone layer. from Earth years ago, both detectable by 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, carried out the latest search for telltale 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 MASS2 ground-based infrared telescope.
While there may be other explanations for the excess infrared signatures they found, Suazo noted, “The most fascinating explanation might be actual Dyson spheres.”
In their search for the ‘Dyson spheres’, the researchers combined data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope and the Survey MASS2 ground-based infrared telescope. Above, stars that could have ET power plants
Suazo’s group in Sweden determined that seven red M dwarf stars, each no more than 900 light years from Earth, appeared to be producing up to 60 times more infrared heat than would be expected based on their size.
For each red dwarf star, they calculated how much radiation would have to be blocked by some possible energy harvesting technology to produce the measured ratio of infrared heat versus visible light.
The values ranged from 3 to 16 percent coverage for the seven unusual stars they identified.
“This is not like a single solid shell around the star,” as a member of Suazo’s team, astrophysicist Jason Wright of Pennsylvania State University, said. new scientist.
In other words, if these stars proved to be surrounded by alien power plants, they would likely be a variant of the all-encompassing Dyson sphere, called a “Dyson swarm.”
Such a swarm could appear in the form of large fleet of satellites, which would orbit these stars as a means of collecting energy.
“Additional analyzes are definitely 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 are proven to be surrounded by alien power plants, the researchers said, they would likely be a variant of the all-encompassing Dyson sphere, called the ‘Dyson swarm’ (illustrated above).
A Dyson swarm could come in the form of a large fleet of satellites orbiting these stars as a means of harvesting energy, and would only partially cover the star (as illustrated above), unlike the large shell of the classic and original Dyson sphere. concept
The findings from Contardo’s group in Italy were broader, using a different machine learning computer model to look for infrared “technosignatures” of spheres, partial spheres, or Dyson swarms.
They identified 53 candidates, including strange infrared heat around some larger Sun-like stars, in a range that extended beyond Suazo’s team’s candidate stars: up to 6,500 light years from Earth.
“Some of these objects appear to be young stars,” Contardo’s group acknowledged in your study; Young stars are likely to project infrared as they heat clouds of debris and not yet fully formed planets in their equally young solar system.
While Contardo said both his group’s stars and the group’s candidates were “interesting,” he admitted that astronomers and other scientists “will need follow-up observations to confirm anything.”
Suazo’s group suggested that optical spectroscopy would be a useful next step, a technique that has separated older, more interesting stars from those younger stars surrounded by debris and “protoplanets” in the past.