“They could even move the entire solar system to the place we need.”
It was previously assumed that “Dyson spheres” could be used to detect alien life. Scientists say they have found potential evidence of this.
Hypothetical image Dyson swarm surrounding the star.
What would be the final solution to the energy problems of an advanced civilization? The famous British-American physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that it would be a shell consisting of mirrors or solar panels that completely surrounds the star, using all the energy it produces, tells CNN.
“It is to be expected that within a few thousand years after the planet enters the stage of industrial development some intelligent species will be found inhabiting an artificial biosphere completely surrounding its parent star,” Dyson wrote in a 1960 paper, in which he first explained the concept.
If this sounds like science fiction, that's because it is: Dyson got the idea from Olaf Stapledon's novel The Star Maker. 1937, and he always spoke openly about it. The late scientist was professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
Nevertheless, the concept, coming from a thinker who some in the scientific community thought might have been worthy of a Nobel Prize early in his career, caught on, and the hypothetical megastructures became known as “Dyson spheres,” although the physicist later clarified that that in reality they will consist of «a loose collection or swarm of objects», they move in independent orbits around the star.
In his paper, Richard Dyson also noted that Dyson spheres would produce excess heat, which could be detected as infrared radiation, and suggested that searching for this byproduct would be a viable method for searching for extraterrestrial life. However, he added that infrared radiation alone does not necessarily indicate the presence of extraterrestrial intelligence and that one of the most compelling reasons to search for such sources is that new types of natural astronomical objects may be discovered.
“Scientists (at the time) were largely receptive not to the possibility of discovering the existence of alien civilizations, but to the idea that searching for waste heat would be a good direction to look, “ comments George Dyson, technology commentator and author, the second of Dyson's six children. – Science fiction, from ”Treads" before Star Trek, took up the idea and developed it further, while social critics used the Dyson sphere as a means to question the wisdom of unlimited technological growth.
Dyson Sr. himself argued: “It would be much more useful to look for intelligence directly, but technology is the only thing we have any chance of seeing.”
In the 1960s, it wasn't possible to actually look for Dyson spheres, but recently many researchers have begun looking for them, including at the SETI Institute, a non-profit organization whose mission is to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. known as Fermilab. Now a new study that examined 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially contain Dyson spheres — a discovery that is attracting close attention and alternative theories.
The authors of the study, published in May in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, specifically looked for Dyson spheres in the form of infrared radiation near stars that cannot be explained in any other way.
Using historical data from telescopes that record infrared signatures, the research team studied stars less than 1,000 light-years from Earth: “We started with a sample of 5 million stars and applied filters to try to remove as much contamination from the data as possible.” , says study leader author Mathias Suazo, a doctoral student in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Uppsala University in Sweden. – So far we have seven sources that we know glow in the infrared, but we don't know why, so they stand out.
Suazo cautions that there is no conclusive evidence that the seven stars surrounded by Dyson spheres.
“It is difficult for us to find an explanation for these sources because we do not have enough data to prove what is the real cause of the infrared glow, – he said. – These could be Dyson spheres because they behave as our models predict, but they could also be something else.
Natural causes that could explain the infrared glow include poor viewing positions where a galaxy in the background occludes the star, planetary collisions producing debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris. , from which planets will later form.
The data used by the researchers comes from two operational space telescopes — NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and the European Space Agency's Gaia, as well as the Two Micron All Sky Survey. The collaboration between the University of Massachusetts and the US Space Agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also known as 2MASS, took place between 1997 and 2001.
All of the candidate stars are red dwarfs, the most common type of star in our galaxy. They are also dimmer and smaller than our sun, making follow-up observations difficult. At the moment, it is unclear whether there are planets around the stars, since they have not yet been observed by any of the telescopes that could potentially detect orbiting planets. However, many of the thousands of exoplanets scientists have discovered so far orbit red dwarfs, making their presence likely; Planets orbiting red dwarfs are more likely to be habitable, according to NASA.
An earlier study published in March, using data from the same sources as the new report, also found infrared anomalies among a sample of 5 million stars in our galaxy.
«We have 53 candidates for anomalies that cannot be clearly explained, but we can't say that they are all candidates for a Dyson sphere because that's not what we're specifically looking for,» said Gabriella Contardo, research scientist International School of Advanced Study in Trieste (Italy), which led the study. earlier study. She added that she plans to compare candidates with Suazo's model to see how many fit it.
“You need to rule out all other hypotheses and explanations before you say it could be a Dyson sphere,” she added. “To do that, you also have to rule out that it's not some kind of debris disk or some kind of planetary collision, and it also moves science forward in other areas of astronomy — so it's a win-win.”
Both Contardo and Suazo agree that more research into the findings is needed, and that they could eventually turn to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for more information, since it is powerful enough to directly observe the candidate stars. However, due to the lengthy competitive procedures governing the use of the telescope, it may take some time to secure access.
If Dyson spheres really exist, what could they be used for? “If we imagine that we had as much energy as the sun produces every second, we could create unheard of things,” says Suazo. – We could make interstellar travel, perhaps we could even move the entire solar system to our desired location if we wanted.
But don't hold your breath because the technology and raw materials needed to build the hypothetical structures are far beyond the capabilities of humanity.
“They are so large that everything we have on Earth would not be enough to build them,” Suazo added. — Freeman Dyson said we should dismantle Jupiter — the entire planet (for the sake of raw materials)”.
This super-bulky scale likely means that Dyson spheres, if they exist at all, are very rare.
“The importance of this work is that it provides the first conclusive evidence that there are not many Dyson spheres in our galaxy, contrary to the expectations of some that they may be the inevitable end of the expansion of technological species into their solar systems,” said co-author research Jason Wright, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Pennsylvania State University, via email. — The candidates discovered by Matias Suazo are important because, whatever they are — and these are most likely stars surrounded by material as a result of some rare event such as a planetary collision, although they may be Dyson spheres — they are rare and interesting objects worthy of further study, for example with the James Webb telescope.»
Dyson died in 2020 before any of his spheres could be found, although it is only one of a dozen ideas bearing his name.
“As a young scientist, Dyson showed that three competing quantum theories were actually the same theory, and he ended up winning the competition, — said William Press, a professor of computer science and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin (he was not involved in the study). “He later applied his genius to areas such as astronomy, cosmology, the extraterrestrial world, and the very real problem of nuclear proliferation here on planet Earth.” At the time of his death, he was recognized as a provocative and creative thinker.
George Dyson also testified to his father's passion and comprehensive approach to various disciplines.
“Taking advantage of the fact that he had a short attention span and an aversion to bureaucracy, and made contributions to five areas of mathematics and eleven areas of physics, as well as theoretical biology, engineering, operations research, literature and public relations, the younger Dyson said. — Many of his ideas were controversial, and one of his guiding principles was that «it is better to be wrong than to be vague.»
The approach of the researchers behind the new study may offer a more fruitful path to search for extraterrestrial intelligence, said Tomotsugu Goto, an assistant professor of astronomy at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He also did not take part in the study.