Extraterrestrial

Could we have already picked up evidence of alien Dyson spheres ?

By T.K. Randall
May 12, 2024 ·  8 comments

Can we pick up alien technosignatures from the Earth ? Image Credit: Midjourney Astronomers are currently on the look-out for signs of Dyson spheres and some even believe that data previously recorded by telescopes could already contain the evidence that they are looking for.

The concept of a Dyson sphere was first put forward over 50 years ago by the late physicist Freeman Dyson who proposed the possibility that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial race may be able to completely surround a star with a huge spherical structure and then live on the inside of the sphere.

Such a structure would be incomprehensibly large - akin to putting together something much larger than the Death Star from Star Wars - and with the added complexity of building it around a star.

It stands to reason, therefore, that it should be possible to observe evidence of something that big through a telescope, even if it happened to be situated many hundreds of light years away.If we could find one, it could prove the existence of an advanced alien civilization.

To this end, an international team of researchers has developed a way to parse through huge amounts of existing astronomical data to identify potential Dyson sphere technosignatures.

Known as Project Hephaistos, the search is now well underway.

"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 researchers wrote.

It will certainly interesting to see what, if anything, the team manages to come up with.

Source: Phys.org | Comments (8)

Tags: Dyson Sphere, Alien