2024-05-13 16:06:00
Astronomers have summarized their search for partial Dyson spheres around five million stars in the Milky Way. They found seven interesting candidates associated with red dwarfs that require further testing. Article published In the magazine Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
An idea Dyson Spheres was proposed in the early 1960s by physicist Freeman Dyson and was that highly developed extraterrestrial civilizations are capable of creating giant cocoons around their stars, allowing them to collect and use energy most efficiently emitted by the star. By Kardashev scale Such a structure can be created by a civilization of the second type, while humanity has not even reached the level of a civilization of the first type. Such objects can be detected by tracking optically weak radiation sources that simultaneously produce excess infrared radiation that cannot be explained by natural processes, but so far no research program has led to the discovery of convincing candidates for Dyson spheres.
A team of astronomers led by Matías Suazo from Uppsala University has published the results of a search for candidates for the Dyson sphere as part of the Hephaestus project. Previous researchers obtained upper limits on the number of such objects (less than one per hundred thousand sources), they have now presented the results of searches for partially completed Dyson spheres in a sample of approximately five million sources in the photometric data from Gaia DR3, 2MASS and AllWISE catalogs containing observational data in the optical and infrared ranges.
As the sample was analyzed, the researchers eliminated contaminated sources (young stars obscured by dust or stars associated in some way with dust nebulae) and sources whose the emission can be explained by natural processes. Astronomers also searched for objects whose spectral energy distributions were consistent with models of stars having partially completed Dyson spheres.
As a result, seven interesting sources associated with red dwarfs remained. All present an excess of emission in the mid-infrared, poorly explained by astrophysical processes, but which corresponds to the Dyson sphere model with temperatures of 100 to 700 kelvins and stellar coverage coefficients of 0.1 to 0, 9. So far, scientists are very cautious about the possibility of explaining the properties of these sources using astroengineering structures and intend to test this connection using future spectroscopic observations , because these systems may contain young circumstellar disks.
We explained how scientists tried to explain the behavior of a mysterious star in the Milky Way, and what does the Dyson Sphere have to do with it? “The Detective Story of Tubby Star”.
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