Space & Astronomy

Dyson spheres can only be built in one type of star system, study finds

By T.K. Randall
April 16, 2025 ·  19 comments

Concept art of a Dyson sphere under construction. Image Credit: CC BY-SA 4.0 Wiki / LoveEmployee More than 50 years ago, Dyson proposed the possibility that a sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial race might be able to completely surround a star with a huge spherical structure and then harness the entirety of that star's energy.

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 stellar body.

While the idea has been explored by scientists for years, the biggest problem with such a structure - aside from the tremendous amount of time and resources needed to build one - would be actually keeping it tethered in place.

Now, though, a new study headed up by Colin McInnes - an engineer at the University of Glasgow - has potentially found a solution to this and it is all to do with building the Dyson sphere around a star in a binary star system (one with two stars) as oppose to around a single, solitary star.He found that under very specific circumstances - where the binary system has one star that is much smaller than the other - a stable Dyson sphere could be constructed around the smaller star and be held in place with its movement around the larger star acting as a gravitational anchor.

The smaller star would need to be ten times smaller than its partner and the sphere itself would also have to be very thin, otherwise its own gravity would mess up the balance.

But while this could theoretically make such a structure plausible, it doesn't take into account engineering concerns such as the stresses placed on its outer shell.

Of course, if an advanced alien civilization built something like this, they may have been able to solve these types of issues.

Ultimately, though, without actually finding one of these somewhere out in space, we may never know for sure whether or not a Dyson sphere could ever actually be built in practice.

Source: Live Science | Comments (19)

Tags: Dyson Sphere, Alien