Search for Half Built Dyson Spheres Finds Seven Candidates

This actually makes real sense and we now have enough data to look at.

my own ruminations tend toward producing rotating wheels in space producing one g of inetial gravity along its rim.  These can be put up easily enough with a zeto gravity hub for docking and manufacturing space craft and acting as the holder for the suspension cables.  Pretty easy to model and build out in working steps as well to a hub length thgat can climb in stages to even a mile or so.

now imagine somehow putting up a rim without a hub using gravity management.  Make it big enough to be stable inside the orbit of jupiter.  bit of a trick folks.

we may still be able to detect this.  and it certainly has to evolve and cousume mass from gas giants.

i am not holding my breath here but we are going to build space stations just the way i described and SOON.

Search for Half Built Dyson Spheres Finds Seven Candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE

May 13, 2024 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2024/05/search-for-half-built-dyson-spheres-finds-seven-candidates-from-gaia-dr3-2mass-and-wise.html

Astronomers decided to look for partially constructed Dyson spheres and other megastructures around stars. They determined that half-built Dyson spheres or megastructures would be easy to see with our telescopes. They made a fairly comprehensive search and found seven candidate stars. The candidate 

The best ways to search for extraterrestrial intelligence is to theorize what should be easy to see with our instruments and then to try to look for those signatures. The Milky Way galaxy contains between 100 and 400 billion stars, and at least as many planets. If aliens tried what we have tried so far then they would not detect our civilization.

Dyson spheres, megastructures that could be constructed by advanced civilizations to harness the radiation energy of their host stars, represent a potential technosignature, that in principle may be hiding in public data already collected as part of large astronomical surveys. In this study, researchers present a comprehensive search for partial Dyson spheres by analyzing optical and infrared observations from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE. They developed a pipeline that employs multiple filters to identify potential candidates and reject interlopers in a sample of five million objects, which incorporates a convolutional neural network to help identify confusion in WISE data. Finally, the pipeline identifies 7 candidates deserving of further analysis. All of these objects are M-dwarfs, for which astrophysical phenomena cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission.

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Freeman Dyson came invented the idea of a Dyson sphere in the 1960s. An advanced civilization can construct an artificial, light-absorbing structure around their host star. This hypothetical structure, later referred to as a Dyson Sphere would allow them to harvest energy in the form of starlight. Starlight harvesting could, in principle, result in different observational signatures that may be detected using existing telescopes. These signatures include optical dimming of the host star due to direct obscuration, and waste-heat emission from the structure.

Most search efforts have aimed for individual complete Dyson spheres, employing far-infrared photometry (e.g., Slysh 1985;Jugaku & Nishimura 1991; Timofeev et al. 2000; Carrigan 2009) from the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS: Neugebauer et al. 1984), while a few considered partial Dyson spheres (e.g., Jugaku & Nishimura 2004). IRAS scanned the sky in the far infrared, providing data of ≈ 250,000 point sources. Currently astronomers rely on photometric surveys covering optical, near-infrared, and mid-infrared wavelengths that reach object counts of up to about one billion targets and allow for larger search programs.

Within the context of Project Hephaistos, in Suazo et al. (2022) the researchers established upper limits on the prevalence of partial Dyson

spheres in the Milky Way by analyzing the fraction of sources from Gaia DR2 and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) that

exhibit infrared excess. In total, more than 100 million stars were analyzed in that work. The exact upper limits on the fraction of stars that may host Dyson spheres reported by Suazo et al. (2022) are a function of distance, covering fraction and Dyson sphere temperature, but reach as low as ∼ 1 in 100,000 objects in the most constraining situation.

Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.

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