Earlier this year, scientists proposed that one of NASA’s spacecraft — the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE — may have discovered signals that could indicate the presence of megastructures used to harvest the energy of stars. These so-called “Dyson spheres” would be a sign of highly advanced civilizations capable of making major changes to their planetary systems.
Yet, not everyone was sold on these detections, and a scientist working with WISE (the spacecraft was renamed “NEOWISE” in 2013) is determined to set the record straight. He suggests the signals are far likelier to represent dusty galaxies with shrouded and ravenous black holes that are colorfully named “Hot DOGs.”
“As a mainstream WISE Team member, working on WISE-detected distant galaxies, the steady occasional reference to ‘Dyson spheres’ since launch has been an annoyance,” British astronomer and University of Leicester astronomer Andrew Blain told Space.com. “The appearance of the paper over the summer almost saying ‘here they are’ was finally too much!”
Dyson sphere detections get cooked
As humanity is quickly discovering, the price of being a technologically advanced civilization has to do with the huge energy demands that come with our inventions.
But the primary energy source in any planetary system is its central star, meaning that alien civilizations (if they exist, of course) could turn to their stars to siphon off the stellar energy they require directly, preventing any of this energy from leaking into space and becoming unusable.
Related: Life after stellar death? How life could arise on planets orbiting white dwarfs
A “Dyson sphere” is a hypothetical megastructure that could surround a star and directly harness its energy. This technology was first suggested by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960. Since then, many scientists have been hunting these potential megastructures, reasoning that the detection of such a thing would constitute the discovery of a highly advanced alien race.
One potential signal from such an energy-harvesting megastructure would be the detection of excess “waste heat” in the form of infrared radiation. Indeed, the team known as Project Hephaistos searches for such signals among 5 million stars using data from WISE, the Gaia spacecraft, and other telescopes.
In May 2024, Project Hephaistos is the group that published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal…
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