Stockholm, Sweden – An international team of researchers has potentially identified seven stars that could be hosting highly advanced alien civilizations, thanks to their innovative search for Dyson spheres—hypothetical megastructures that harness a star’s energy. The team, comprising scientists from Sweden, India, the US, and the UK, published their findings in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Academy of Sciences.
Dyson spheres, first proposed by physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson in 1960, are envisioned as vast, solar-system-sized structures consisting of a swarm of objects orbiting a star to capture its energy. Such a project could only be undertaken by civilizations that are at least Level II on the Kardashev scale, which measures a civilization’s level of technological advancement based on its energy consumption.
The team’s project, named “Project Hephaistos,” has devised a method to search for technosignatures of these megastructures. By analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia map of stars, the 2MASS infrared astronomical survey, and NASA’s WISE infrared astronomy space telescope, they filtered through millions of space objects to find candidates displaying anomalous infrared excesses.
“This structure would emit waste heat in the form of mid-infrared radiation that, in addition to the level of completion of the structure, would depend on its effective temperature,” explained Matias Suazo of Sweden’s Uppsala University. “A specialized pipeline has been developed to identify potential Dyson sphere candidates focusing on detecting sources that display anomalous infrared excesses that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation.”
The team’s rigorous analysis narrowed the initial pool of about 5 million objects down to 368 potential candidates. After rejecting 328 as blends, 29 as irregulars, and four as nebulae, they were left with seven promising candidates.
“All sources are clear mid-infrared emitters with no clear contaminators or signatures that indicate an obvious mid-infrared origin,” the researchers noted.
The discovery of these potential Dyson spheres is only the beginning. The team now plans to perform optical spectroscopy to gain a better understanding of the nature of these seven candidates.
The implications of discovering such advanced extraterrestrial structures are profound, as they suggest the presence of civilizations far more technologically advanced than our own, capable of engineering on an astronomical scale. This groundbreaking research brings us a step closer to answering the age-old question of whether we are alone in the universe.
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