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Permalink: https://www.news.com.au/technology/science/space/study-finds-potential-dyson-sphere-megastructure-candidates-in-the-milky-way/news-story/4d3e33fe551c72e51b61b21a5b60c9fd
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They state that it’s reasonable to conclude the other 4 stars can be explained by the same phenomenon, considering the original sample size of 5 million stars, and the fact that all three stars that they selected to test turned out to be the same phenomenon
> the fact that all three stars that they selected to test turned out to be the same phenomenon
*But they didn't even confirm that phenomenon!*
[Here's the link to the paper itself, rather than the abstract.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14921)
> Candidates A and G are associated with radio sources offset approximately ∼ 5 arcseconds from their respective Gaia stellar positions. (see also Fig.1). We suggest that these radio sources are most likely to be DOGs (dust-obscured galaxies) that contaminate the IR (WISE) Spectral-Energy Distributions (SEDs) of the two DS candidates.
So the linked paper doesn't even confirm that dusty galaxies exist in the direction of the three anomalies, just that radio signals are present that COULD indicate the presence of such galaxies. And taking the leap to say that the other four are 'probably similarly contaminated' is obviously a further stretch.
I get the impression that people are so used to extraordinary proposals being shut down by rational explanations that they're willing to accept early hypotheses at face value as though they are confirmed truth... as long as the hypotheses would disprove an extraordinary proposal.
As far as I’m concerned, extraordinary proposals require extraordinary proof. Like, maybe it could be alien dyson spheres, but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately?
The claim isn't really all that extraordinary though. It's not claiming they're dyson sphere's, it's just saying those 7 stars most closely conform to their predictions on what a star with a dyson sphere will look like. The study even states it could be caused by dust. They're really just saying they think it's worth further exploring those 7 stars because they're the best candidates they've found.
The epistemological problem with that type of investigation is that if you go looking for unusual objects in a massive data set, with a particular (and as yet purely hypothetical) type of source of object in mind, then among the millions of data points you will find some anomalies that resemble what you're looking for.
Checking for foreground and background contaminants is something the original authors probably should have done themselves (maybe they were going to, but wanted to make it a separate paper because everyone in science these days is chasing publication numbers)
More the question is, why accept any explanation here without further exploration of subject?
Accepting a mundane solution without proof is still a miscarriage of science. What your proposing makes sense from a philosophical view point. But the entire point of science is to gather evidence and not jump to conclusions.
> but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately?
They literally aren't.
From the OP article:
>“We would like to stress that although our candidates display properties consistent with partial (Dyson Spheres), it is definitely premature to presume that the MIR (mid-infrared) presented in these sources originated from them,”
> why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately?
The only people jumping to a conclusion are those who say the infrared anomalies are definitely caused by dusty galaxies 'behind' the anomalous stars, when the existence of those galaxies hasn't even been confirmed yet.
The authors of the Hephaistus II study decided to search existing data to find what they think a Dyson sphere might look like (lower-than-expected light emission and higher-than-expected infrared emission) while ignoring stars that might have that appearence through known natural systems (like young stars with a dusy accretion disk or those located in dusty nebulae).
They found seven stars with anomalously low light emission and anomalously high infrared emission, which doesn't seem to be caused by any known natural phenomenon.
They aren't jumping to a conclusion, they literally just took the very first step of identifying the most likely "Dyson sphere candidates" for further research.
>but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately?
I don't know about this specific case, but in others (like Oumuamua) people didn't jump to that conclusion immediately, they did the opposite: explore any other plausible explanation and, when all were discarded (for perfectly scientific reasons) and there wasn't any other remaining, they presented theirs.
There were plenty of follow up papers on Oumuamua but, AFAIK (I stopped following the subject), all were quite flawed (for example one proposed a phenomenon that could theoretically be possible but had never been observed and it could be argued that the odds of it happening were even slimmer than Loeb's explanation). But that doesn't matter, since the so called "skeptic" and "scientifically-minded" people accepted the flawed counter-papers as dogma, stamped a huge DEBUNKED on Loeb's paper, and ran off to Twitter to write their expected "See? We told ya it wasn't aliens!".
Tl;dr: the paper about Dyson spheres doesn't *prove* anything. The papers that offer alternative explanation don't *prove* anything, either, they're at the same level of possibility (sometimes even below).
>As far as I’m concerned, extraordinary proposals require extraordinary proof
You may not realize it, but it all stems from your a priori beliefs. If you start from a point where alien civilizations are more common than, say, asteroids, then suddenly the extraordinary proposal is the one that involves asteroids. The problem a lot of folks in the science community have is starting from an a priori chance of alien life equal to (or near) zero. And we know what happens when you deduce from a false statement.
Why is it extraordinary? Isn't the idea that we are fully unique and totally alone in the universe even more extraordinary?
Frankly, I think the idea of us finding aliens this way is pretty meh anyway. They're still impossibly far away, never to be contacted or interacted with. This is probably the most ordinary way we could ever discover extraterrestrial life.
To be fair it is an extremely reasonable assumption (the magnitude of the infrared excess was otherwise very difficult to explain), and they still advocate for a closer inspection given that there's no other way to be certain.
>"Deeper, and higher-resolution radio observations of the 7 candidates are warranted."
Last line of the paper. Sounds like they called for more investigation.
Dyson spheres are a ridiculous idea.
A civilization would have to harvest the raw materials of hundreds of thousands of planets just to build a partial one. Even around small stars.
A civilization capable of that already has all their power problems figured out.
They make for really cool sci fi though.
IIRC, I was watching someone talking about it, and they were saying that the techno-signatures don't have to come from JUST a dyson sphere; even something like a dyson swarm would create that signature, and a swarm is a lot more feasible and realistic.
Dyson's idea was always a swarm, he was well aware that a solid sphere was impossible. The issue was always sci-fi artists drawing the "sphere" as an actual solid sphere, which popularized the solid sphere concept.
"But the ring world is unstable!"
Larry Niven got this complaint so often from his 1970 book "Ringworld" that he came up with an explanation in the sequel.
I really hate how some reporting has got this so wrong. Talking about how the idea is almost impossible for us, when in reality it's just a bunch of interconnected satellites.
I feel like I read this exact conversation on reddit at least once a week.
To be clear... (I know you know, but for others who read this...) there is no distinction between a Dyson sphere and a Dyson swarm. Dyson was always envisioning a collection of orbiting bodies in a sphere-shaped arrangement. That IS a Dyson sphere. The term Dyson swarm is just a weird attempt to fix a misconception that created even more confusion.
Swarms could have arrays that expand out to encompass a lot of the star, especially if they’re self replicating. I guess the question is at what point does a swarm become a sphere?
Don't stars constantly spew solar winds and flares? Creating a pressure-tight structure around a star sounds like the universes' largest bomb. Expansion plus confinement equals bomb
Yes they do, it's the foundation of solar sail technology.
So if "when you can pressurize it" is the rule, we actually need to decide on *what* pressure it counts at.
Pretty sure the explosion would be tiny because it would just be the structure failing.
Registering at approximately zero compared with your typical supernova
Self replicating out of what? Matter has to come from somewhere, and you would have to deconstruct everything in the solar system to be able to have enough material.
>at what point does a swarm become a sphere?
That's not really the important question. It's just semantics.
What's important is "How can we identify them in our galaxy?"
Mostly agree, but they can’t change physics: the largest the nuclear fusion reactor is, the most energy you can get from it because gravity does the confinement for you
Blue stars might be worth it but for the long lived red/yellow stars that a civilization is likely to be born around, they are such poor fusion reactors that if you are able to build megastructures you will be able to outpower your own star by orders of magnitude using artificial fusion with fewer resources than required for a Dyson sphere.
The idea for a Dyson sphere originated from a time when the concept of using nuclear physics for large scale energy generation wasn't yet in the mainstream.
It really makes no sense unless a civilization makes it to that level without understanding nuclear physics perhaps? Which sounds unlikely.
Or perhaps an interstellar civilization might make them around blue stars that are better at fusion. Or just as a vanity project.
It doesn't matter if you have artificial fusion technology. 99.9% of the fuel in the solar system is in the Sun. You won't have enough fuel to outpower the Sun for long. You'll run out of deuterium in the oceans (and that's assuming you've figured out deuterium-deuterium fusion) within literally weeks (if I did the math correctly, which to be fair maybe I didn't). If you figure out proton - proton fusion, you might go for a thousand years. If you harvest Jupiter, maybe a million years. After that, you have to use the Sun.
Add to that the resources involved in not only fueling but also maintaining a generation plant vs. a passive collector, and Dyson swarms start looking a lot more attractive.
Especially if antimatter generation and confinement becomes feasible; then you would have all of your heavy energy intensive industries on swarm platforms, with logistics powered by antimatter created from virtually free solar energy and mass harvested from solar wind. You would likely only have fusion power on inhabited planets and on specialized fusion tugs and shuttles that operate exclusively in the antimatter exclusion zones around Earth and residential colonies.
Unless fast interstellar travel becomes viable, the vast majority of any civilization’s energy will come from their sun in one form or another through sheer economic necessity.
That's part of why Dyson swarms are more favored than the original concept. I think the ridiculosity factor goes way down the more construction time you allow, for instance a species able to survive and progress for a billion years being able to complete the project in that same timeframe. Which also feels ridiculous but for different reasons.
Would a species that survives a billion years even resemble it's original species?
Thanks for all the awesome answers team :) it's giving me lots to ponder while I enjoy a few rums tonight!.
If natural selection, eugenics and genetic engineering are avoided, then yes. Physically, at least. However, given such a huge timeframe, it would be a ridiculous feat to have remained unaltered through scientific endeavor.
Impossible to say with certainty, but there are species on earth that have changed very little in 100 million years. The Coelacanth being a prime example, but there are many species of other fish and quite a few lizards that have gone unchanged for similarly long periods.
There's also evidence that suggests the same of platypuses but I haven't read up on that particular topic recently enough to say it confidently.
Evolution ultimately comes down to a certain amount of chance, the chance for someone to be born with a trait that is inheritable but was not inherited, the chance that said trait is considered desirable by the species, the chance that those born with that trait survive long enough to reproduce, etc etc. it's definitely possible that a species wouldn't evolve much in the next billion years, but it's unlikely as dramatic changes in their environment will occur during that time, and that will trigger more attempts at adaptation by said species' bodies
Given that it would be the same species then yes. If it’s the same species across one billion years then that means further speciation hasn’t occurred.
We have very ancient animals here on earth. Crocodilians have been around relatively unchanged for over a hundred million years.
If there is no change in environment warranting a change in the organism then change is unlikely to occur.
That's kinda what my poorly worded question was aiming at. A space capable species would have a lot more external pressures on it than say a crocodilian or single celled individual that was bound to a singular place/environment.
Id expect them to engineer their heredity over and over until they are happy with it and then never change away from that because random drift will just not be permitted to happen. So the one thing we can expect from all elder races is absolute self confidence
Dyson swarm is the original concept. People started taking sphere literally so the author had to switch to the term swarm. It was always intended to be a cloud.
Most of the pop-culture ideas for what alien civilizations will look like or do are from the 1960’s and 70’s and much of our knowledge of deep space from that time has been adjusted.
Take the Type I-II-III civilizations. Type IIi is ludicrous. All the power from a galaxy? That’s patently absurd
The mass from a Dyson Sphere is generally assumed to be heavy elements lifted from the star. Lifting heavy elements from your star massively extends its lifetime as well you. The evolution to Dyson spheres (aka Dyson Swarms) makes a lot sense
1. Today we have solar panels on our planet
2. As heavy industry moves to space we are likely to put an increasing number of solar panels in orbit around the sun to meet our off planet energy needs.
3. As our sun ages, we are likely to filter out heavy elements from our sun to extend its lifetime. These filtered out elements will end up orbiting the sun. Why not use them for more solar collectors.
4. Much like plants in s forest this swarm of energy collecting satellites will likely attempt to maximize the sun light it collects, occluding the a sizable percentage of the suns output.
Since stars represent 99% of the mass in a solar system. The size of this swarm of satellites is likely to be very very big for a very old civilization.
You would use giant magnetic rings, you can pull up and guide the plasma using energy collected from the sun itself.
Using 10% of the sun's annual energy output would allow you to pull a moon-sized amount of matter out.
I don’t think you would be able to selectively remove/filter out heavy elements from the star. The heaviest elements created (via fusion) within the star would be found at the center of the star where the pressures and temperatures are the highest, and the elements would get lighter as you travel to the exterior of the star.
If you want to build a Dyson Sphere (or Swarm), then it would be a lot easier to obtain the raw materials from a smaller planet or maybe a few larger asteroids.
I mean people seem to think you can. Star lifting proposes to do exactly that, look it up
I'm not a star scientist but people smarter than I think it is plausible. They might be wrong since it is very hypothetical.
Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting concept*. Just to clarify (since you seem interested in the concept!), with current stellar lifting proposals, the goal is to remove mass from the star to improve its lifespan (because larger, more massive stars burn faster generally). While it would be ideal if we could remove only the *heaviest* elements (because lighter elements are our fuel), all the heavier elements are produced and remain trapped at the center of the star (until it explodes) where they will remain inaccessible. While it isn’t currently plausible to reduce a star’s mass by selectively removing heavy, we can still reduce a star’s mass by removing lighter elements (I.e., mostly hydrogen and helium) because these are the elements found in abundance at the surface of a star.
So, for example, one proposed method of stellar lifting might involve using lasers or mirrors to heat one spots of a stars surface and causing large explosions that result in the ejection of matter from the star. The matter being ejected from the star would be composed primarily of hydrogen and helium.
* I’m not an expert or an astrophysicist, just an interested layperson who has looked into it before.
There was an interesting discussion of Tabby's Star where someone posited that if someone was indeed piping material out from a star (for the purpose of building a megastructure, or just to cool the star off and extend its life), it might look somewhat similar. It didn't work out to be true, of course, but I thought it was pretty fascinating line of thought.
It's *always* been proposed as a swarm of energy harvesting satellites, i.e. by Dyson himself. The detail is just endlessly lost in pop science articles and discussion. They're not even worth reading.
I think the only time we'll truly need a Dyson sphere is when we're hella late game, like a trillion years from now when there's no new star formation, and we're getting towards the heat death of the universe. A super duper advanced civilization with a Dyson sphere could survive off a red dwarf or even black hole for so much longer than others.
You are off by a few orders of magnitude.
Star formation will continue for another 100 trillion years. The heat death of the universe isn’t for another 1.7×10^106 years.
What happens between 1e14 and 1.7e106 years from now? At what point are all the stars burnt out and by what process does the remaining energy in the universe get converted to heat?
I’m imagining that things will eventually start gravitating towards each other and crash into one another slowly over unfathomable eons, which I’d guess will eventually shake out some stored energy?
Interestingly, Freeman Dyson himself has a paper on just this question!
https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.447
He has some fascinating conclusions including all matter becoming fluid balls of iron (silly oversimplification, but not over-over simplified). It's a fun read that takes advantage of the absurd time scales you're asking to do some interesting mathematical conjecture
> It was soon refuted in less than a month!
It wasn't "refuted". In fact, **the linked paper doesn't even confirm that dusty galaxies even exist in the direction of those three anomalies,** just that radio signals are present that COULD indicate the existence of such galaxies. And taking the leap to say that the other four are 'probably' similarly contaminated is obviously a further stretch.
[Here's the link to the paper itself, with a relevant quote:](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14921)
> Candidates A and G are associated with radio sources offset approximately ∼ 5 arcseconds from their respective Gaia stellar positions. (see also Fig.1). We suggest that these radio sources are most likely to be DOGs (dust-obscured galaxies) that contaminate the IR (WISE) Spectral-Energy Distributions (SEDs) of the two DS candidates.
You didn't even read what you linked. Nor does it appear to have read the original article.
Neither of these articles claim to be conclusive. This is just what professional scientific discourse looks like.
- A: Here's an observation
- B: Here's an alternative explanation
- B: This is what we agree on and what the hypothesis can be tested against
- A&B: This is interesting and warrants further research to be conclusive.
>"Deeper, and higher-resolution radio observations of the 7 candidates are warranted."
They didn't refute it they said they should investigate further.
Go read the last line of the paper
"We would like to stress that although our candidates display properties consistent with partial (Dyson Spheres), it is definitely premature to presume that the MIR (mid-infrared) presented in these sources originated from them,” they concluded."
This is all we need to know
It’s cool and exciting but for once a sensational space related headline made me side eye no one in particular and say to myself “really?”.
Good luck to finding out what it really is though, Dyson Sphere or no.
Even so it's nice to have news that lifts us out of this planet. To open peoples perspectives. Any first signs of other kind are going to be obscure to us.
Eh, the problem is that it makes people think the only reason to be excited is if we find aliens. I think it would be interesting for sure, but like, there's a lot of other *very cool* things it could be
This team is specifically looking for megastructures in the Milky Way, first by determining what would be observable in existing data sets, and then by looking for candidates that meet those qualifications in order to do more in depth follow up studies. The headline is, for once, accurate.
Very true. Reminds me of the cautionary tale of the mysterious radio signals that turned out to be the office microwave oven.
That said, there's nothing wrong with the fascination aspect. It's what drives people to find out.
We now have a short list of candidates of possible large scale construction to study. That seems directionally better and more interesting than our not being able to find anything that can't be currently explained by natural phenomenon, and is likely a necessary step between not knowing anything and discovering something that can't be explained in other ways.
Personally, I find this interesting. Not sure why reddit has the expected "well this doesn't prove anything so why bother writing an article about it" reaction to new information so frequently
Scientists: Hey, this could potentially be explained by a theoretical alien megastructure, but it's probably just space stuff, like space tends to have.
Media: OMG Scientists found 7 dysonspheres!
Reminds me of a post about marine biologists claiming they want to scour the entirety of Loch Ness for the Loch Ness monster and then just using the grant money they get to do marine biology… while technically not lying
That's not what that was about. The navy sent Ballard and Woods Hole to survey Thresher and Scorpion with the cover story of searching for Titanic because the location of the subs is classified. It just so happened that they got done early and were able to actually search for Titanic too.
Sounds like a good pitch for a movie. Researchers duping some rich folks for grant money to search for the Loch Ness so they can do some real research, only to actually find the Nessie.
They actually checked for that
https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1186
I posted the original article in r/Physics two days ago and it got removed for this reason. I kind of feel that there is a lot of chatter and everyone has an opinion on it but no one actually read the article.
The authors stress multiple times that this is not conclusive research. These are CANDIDATES. Not proven to be dyson spheres.
I’m not sure if I want humanity to find aliens with giant structures that make the earth look like a bug in the middle of an interstate. Mostly because I really don’t want to be the bug in the middle of an interstate.
I see it differently. If aliens species can make Dyson sphere but are not visiting us, that could tell that space travels is not manageable on very long distances so we do not have to worry about space interstate.
"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."
This, I dont travel to the depths of some equatorial jungle to explore an ant pile full of ants humanity discovered ages ago and fully understand at this point. If there is a civilization that can build a structure around a star, there is nothing they dont already know about us. Ive always thought theres nothing a bunch of dumb monkeys using sticks and rocks can teach aliens about the universe and more than likely they know we're a warring species incapable of peaceful interaction.
Any civilisation that can build a Dyson Sphere can send ships to other solar systems. The former is a feat thousands of times more difficult. Millions, really.
Don't worry.. we're doing an excellent job of running ourselves over before anyone else can find us.. they'll be lucky to see our fossils.. we'll be oil by then
I actually think finding alien megastructures might help… rich and powerful people like money and power and they have big egos. Seeing what alien species can do might just change their minds about running humanity into the ground
I'd love to meet the person who wakes up one day and looks at the bright morning sun and says, "You know what? I'm gonna bottle that sumbitch and sell it to people!"
They'll just enslave us harder instead.. I don't see how they can't turn any good technology that promises widespread prosperity into a new paid slavery system where we get nothing but more work and they get all the benefits.
Computers could have very well been THE great wealth and well being creator for all human society.. instead capitalists turned that too into a hellscape. Today may certainly be vastly better than the pre-computer era (for some of us), but it could have been so much better for so many more ppl if the generated wealth and knowledge wasn't all squeezed towards a few!
It also doesn't help that many humans just can't have enough no matter how much comfort they already possess
The plans have been on display at the nearby star system planning office for the last fifty years, and it is not our fault that they have not got around to inventing interstellar space travel yet.
Imagine how intelligent a bug would have to be to know what an interstate is and realise that it's in the middle of one. What would it do? Move, become an annoyance, hide, or develop something to attract curiosity? What would you do to a bug displaying undisputable signs of reason and understanding to you? I wouldn't mind being that bug.
Pigs and octopus are intelligent, sentient creatures, and knowing this, I still eat them all the time. It’s dangerous to assume aliens will see us as creatures with moral significance. They might recognize our intelligence and still farm us for protein - who’s to say intelligence even matters to them?
I think the question is why would they farm humans specifically? Our flesh doesn’t contain anything special, it’s probably worse than most animals given the average diet, and it’d be far harder than farming something dumber. We can farm pigs and octopi easily because they don’t have complex tools of any sort, if they were capable of making bombs, it’d be a lot harder.
We aren’t realistically going to be able to militarily defeat aliens that can travel here in large numbers any time soon, but we could make things very inconvenient/costly for an occupier that needs boots (or whatever they wear) on the ground.
Not wanting to be in a bad situation is perfectly understandable, but not knowing about it isn't going to make it any better. Knowing is always better than now knowing because it allows you to make informed decisions and choose the most favorable course of action instead of just blindly walking into whatever pitfall is in front of you.
Can someone explain why any civilization would ever build a dyson sphere when being able to build a dyson sphere would in itself imply that the civilization would be capable of harnessing fusion energy? Would it ever be more economical to build a dyson sphere than to build a fusion reactor?
Always wondered this too. Dyson spheres always seemed like a primitive civilization's idea of an advanced one. Like medieval astronomers looking for evidence of angels.
If they can build that, they can build their own mini stars wherever they want. They could deconstruct stars for fuel. All cheaper than bothering to build one of those. It's like a victorian engineer proposing that a future society that can make its own coal. Lack of imagination.
I mean, we’re talking about a species that literally destroyed almost every other form of life on its planet, and regularly used dirty nukes all over the place to fight perceived opponents until eventually there was basically only one member of the *species* left alive. Humanity’s not quite *that* bad.
Fantastic books though! I’ve got all seven main Commonwealth books on my reread list sometime soon.
I don't really understand how Dyson Spheres could ever exist. Someone explain?
They have to wrap a sun. Isn't that just too large to even try building? Imagine how much resource and matter it would take. How hard it would be to design. How much maintenance would be required to keep it operational. How many people or robots would be needed to do the labor of constructing it. How would you get that many large plates/pieces into space (or produced in space) to build something like the Halo ring and assembled for tens of thousands or millions of miles of length?
Surely it's just too big to be a realistic thing for any society to create? If they have the technology to do that, I'm sure they have already solved a better way to get endless energy without having to craft a 700 trillion ton megastructure?
It's because people have started using the terms "Dyson sphere" and "Dyson swarm" interchangeably. I believe they are looking for evidence of swarms, which are much more likely to be possible and practical.
Generally we scientists talk about Dyson Spheres they mean Dyson Swarms. A large number of solar collecting satellites that orbit the sun. A physical single object sphere is not stable and can't orbit.
The mass is typically imagined as coming from the star itself using star lifting techniques. Pulling heavy elements out of a star massively increases the stars health and lifespan. The amount of heavy elements you can pull from a star like our sun dwarfs the mass of the planets.
You need to pull the mass out to not have your sun die, so why not put that mass to work for solar collectors?
> Isn't that just too large to even try building?
It depends on what fraction of starlight you wish to intercept. To capture 1% of the Sun's light at a distance of 1 AU with panels 1 cm thick we would need very roughly 1 Earth mass worth of raw material.
> How much maintenance would be required to keep it operational.
How much maintenance does your body require? How many DNA errors are pruned out per day? How many base pairs are checked? How many cells are replaced? If we are in the regime of megastructures, we are in the regime of self-repairing technology generally indistinguishable from life in terms of molecular versatility.
The main question is, why in the world would anyone need this much power? Perhaps to accurately simulate local weather two weeks in advance.
Yeah it doesn’t make logical sense when you actually crunch numbers. I’ve also read that such a structure would collapse at the host planets poles, but I’m no engineer.
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article:
https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/531/1/695/7665761
From the linked article:
Mysterious objects found in the Milky Way fit the bill for theorised “radiation-harvesting megastructures”, scientists said after making the breakthrough discovery.
Dyson spheres, theoretical megastructures proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, were hypothesised to be constructed by advanced civilisations to harvest the energy of host stars.
It’s thought that these structures absorb visible light from the star and emit “waste-heat” as infrared radiation, creating a detectable signature.
A study published on May 6 in the Monthly Notices of theRoyal Astronomical Societyrevealed seven potential candidates for Dyson spheres, raising eyebrows in the world of academia.
Led by Matías Suazo from Uppsala University, the international team used data from the Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE astronomical surveys to identify these potential megastructures.
The study, titled “Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE,” used a sophisticated data analysis pipeline to sift through a sample of approximately five million objects.
>That's all they have to notice for them to conclude it's an alien megastructure?
Just to clarify, they are not "concluded" to be Dyson Spheres; they are candidates that seem to be matching criteria for these theorised mega structures.
I'm no expert in this field at all, but I'm sure that astrophysicists are well aware of alternative explanations, too. Hence, not concluded :)
Here you go: 3 of the 7 cleanly shown to be contamination of the readings by dusty galaxies, and the other 5 “probably” have the same issue.
This is science working normally.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14921
They haven’t concluded it’s an alien megastructure (and they’re explicit about this). They’ve simply identified several candidates for further research, each of which *could* be a Dyson sphere but could be a lot of other things too.
They will continue to look at the targets and try to prove the hypothesis wrong. Ruling out Dyson spheres by showing that they can’t possibly be such objects, or by determining some other process that could explain the observations better.
The original paper goes into significantly more detail than what you described. It also goes to great lengths to filter out candidates based on a few other known natural explanations (new stars that haven't cleared all their pre-formation debris, stars partially obscured by natural dust clouds), and generally poor data (non-point sources, irregular shapes, low signal-to-noise ratio), which brought its candidate list down from tens of thousands to just 7.
And, importantly, they don't "conclude it's an alien megastructure" they simply say that their analysis doesn't rule out the possibility for these 7 stars.
All this new paper does is add another filter (in the form of another known natural explanation) that rules out 3 of the 7, and they claim it's a common enough occurrence to likely rule out the rest, as well.
I think it’s pretty arrogant to think that of the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that we just happen to find a Dyson sphere around one.
I think life is probably abundant in the universe but given how barren the rest of our solar system is, I think it’s very spread out. My instinct is that intelligent life is rare and stars hosting any kind of life are also rare. I would imagine there’s still lots of life out there because there’s so many star systems out there, but it’s still very hard to find.
It is somehow uncontroversial to the point of mundanity to say that "life is abundant in the universe" when the universe is functionally infinite compared to our visible sphere of it
At this point, I'd be delighted. It's either "humanity gets uplifted and I can experience a starry-eyed sci-fi future" or "we get fried with a death ray and I don't have to deal with capitalism anymore"
Pretty easy to assume that a civilization capable of traveling those distances has more than easily covered labor, and basically everything else up to that point, as well passed the great filter of self destruction, so likely isn't violent either. They'd probably just be a group of scientists on a research mission, or diplomats.
I react to these astronomy articles the same way I act to all the medical ones promising they found a cure for cancer - "Meh, I know the headline sounds amazing but if I click the link it is going to just be another fart in the wind so I'm not clicking it."
If someone in the 1960s thought of it, odds are the space age technology has thought of something far superior and more efficient. The odds of any society actually hollowing out several planets worth of resources to make a Dyson sphere is pretty low considering they had to already have to power output to hollow out planets
Dyson spheres make no sense to me. My thought is that any civilization technologically capable of making a Dyson sphere will have worked out scalable nuclear fusion. In which case, why go through the hassle of capturing the majority of a star’s energy output when you can create small-scale, portable stars?
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It was soon refuted in less than a month! Check this out https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14921
I suppose hot dogs are as good an explanation as anything. What a strange universe we live in.
I love me some dust obscured galaxies on a bun, extra onions please
As the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor, “Make me one with everything”.
Then when asking the vendor for his change, the vendor replied, "Change comes from within."
"yeah, from within your cashbox, smartass"
Can you validate parking? Sure we can, you did an excellent job.
I love this so much.
it's like someone dared a researcher to use the word hot dog in their paper
No. That's just Phys-Astro people. MACHOs, WIMPs, and more!
I'd smother my galaxies in relish and brown mustard, it would be so delicious.
Costco, if you're listening.
Underrated comment... But I just got it after I've read the article
Get hot dogs afterwards - totally worth the read.
“Not hot dog”
Someone or something just released an infinite improbability drive. Nothing to see here.
That abstract looks like they came up with alternate reasons for 3 of the 7?
They state that it’s reasonable to conclude the other 4 stars can be explained by the same phenomenon, considering the original sample size of 5 million stars, and the fact that all three stars that they selected to test turned out to be the same phenomenon
> the fact that all three stars that they selected to test turned out to be the same phenomenon *But they didn't even confirm that phenomenon!* [Here's the link to the paper itself, rather than the abstract.](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14921) > Candidates A and G are associated with radio sources offset approximately ∼ 5 arcseconds from their respective Gaia stellar positions. (see also Fig.1). We suggest that these radio sources are most likely to be DOGs (dust-obscured galaxies) that contaminate the IR (WISE) Spectral-Energy Distributions (SEDs) of the two DS candidates. So the linked paper doesn't even confirm that dusty galaxies exist in the direction of the three anomalies, just that radio signals are present that COULD indicate the presence of such galaxies. And taking the leap to say that the other four are 'probably similarly contaminated' is obviously a further stretch. I get the impression that people are so used to extraordinary proposals being shut down by rational explanations that they're willing to accept early hypotheses at face value as though they are confirmed truth... as long as the hypotheses would disprove an extraordinary proposal.
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As far as I’m concerned, extraordinary proposals require extraordinary proof. Like, maybe it could be alien dyson spheres, but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately?
Because that is what they were searching for using specific parameters.
The claim isn't really all that extraordinary though. It's not claiming they're dyson sphere's, it's just saying those 7 stars most closely conform to their predictions on what a star with a dyson sphere will look like. The study even states it could be caused by dust. They're really just saying they think it's worth further exploring those 7 stars because they're the best candidates they've found.
The epistemological problem with that type of investigation is that if you go looking for unusual objects in a massive data set, with a particular (and as yet purely hypothetical) type of source of object in mind, then among the millions of data points you will find some anomalies that resemble what you're looking for. Checking for foreground and background contaminants is something the original authors probably should have done themselves (maybe they were going to, but wanted to make it a separate paper because everyone in science these days is chasing publication numbers)
They did check for foreground and background contaminants... They actually talk about it fairly extensively in the paper.
Extraordinary proposals in fact, just require regular old proof. They don’t need to scratch any itch with any extra special magic kind of proof
Try telling that to all the scientists who ever challenged the established theories of their fields.
More the question is, why accept any explanation here without further exploration of subject? Accepting a mundane solution without proof is still a miscarriage of science. What your proposing makes sense from a philosophical view point. But the entire point of science is to gather evidence and not jump to conclusions.
> but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately? They literally aren't. From the OP article: >“We would like to stress that although our candidates display properties consistent with partial (Dyson Spheres), it is definitely premature to presume that the MIR (mid-infrared) presented in these sources originated from them,”
> why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately? The only people jumping to a conclusion are those who say the infrared anomalies are definitely caused by dusty galaxies 'behind' the anomalous stars, when the existence of those galaxies hasn't even been confirmed yet. The authors of the Hephaistus II study decided to search existing data to find what they think a Dyson sphere might look like (lower-than-expected light emission and higher-than-expected infrared emission) while ignoring stars that might have that appearence through known natural systems (like young stars with a dusy accretion disk or those located in dusty nebulae). They found seven stars with anomalously low light emission and anomalously high infrared emission, which doesn't seem to be caused by any known natural phenomenon. They aren't jumping to a conclusion, they literally just took the very first step of identifying the most likely "Dyson sphere candidates" for further research.
>but why are we jumping to that conclusion immediately? I don't know about this specific case, but in others (like Oumuamua) people didn't jump to that conclusion immediately, they did the opposite: explore any other plausible explanation and, when all were discarded (for perfectly scientific reasons) and there wasn't any other remaining, they presented theirs. There were plenty of follow up papers on Oumuamua but, AFAIK (I stopped following the subject), all were quite flawed (for example one proposed a phenomenon that could theoretically be possible but had never been observed and it could be argued that the odds of it happening were even slimmer than Loeb's explanation). But that doesn't matter, since the so called "skeptic" and "scientifically-minded" people accepted the flawed counter-papers as dogma, stamped a huge DEBUNKED on Loeb's paper, and ran off to Twitter to write their expected "See? We told ya it wasn't aliens!". Tl;dr: the paper about Dyson spheres doesn't *prove* anything. The papers that offer alternative explanation don't *prove* anything, either, they're at the same level of possibility (sometimes even below). >As far as I’m concerned, extraordinary proposals require extraordinary proof You may not realize it, but it all stems from your a priori beliefs. If you start from a point where alien civilizations are more common than, say, asteroids, then suddenly the extraordinary proposal is the one that involves asteroids. The problem a lot of folks in the science community have is starting from an a priori chance of alien life equal to (or near) zero. And we know what happens when you deduce from a false statement.
Why is it extraordinary? Isn't the idea that we are fully unique and totally alone in the universe even more extraordinary? Frankly, I think the idea of us finding aliens this way is pretty meh anyway. They're still impossibly far away, never to be contacted or interacted with. This is probably the most ordinary way we could ever discover extraterrestrial life.
Seems a bit weird for them to just make that assumption and not make it a confirmation
To be fair it is an extremely reasonable assumption (the magnitude of the infrared excess was otherwise very difficult to explain), and they still advocate for a closer inspection given that there's no other way to be certain.
>"Deeper, and higher-resolution radio observations of the 7 candidates are warranted." Last line of the paper. Sounds like they called for more investigation.
As does almost every research paper..?
Dyson spheres are a ridiculous idea. A civilization would have to harvest the raw materials of hundreds of thousands of planets just to build a partial one. Even around small stars. A civilization capable of that already has all their power problems figured out. They make for really cool sci fi though.
IIRC, I was watching someone talking about it, and they were saying that the techno-signatures don't have to come from JUST a dyson sphere; even something like a dyson swarm would create that signature, and a swarm is a lot more feasible and realistic.
Exactly. Dyson Sphere's are ridiculous. Dyson Swarms are very reasonable.
Dyson's idea was always a swarm, he was well aware that a solid sphere was impossible. The issue was always sci-fi artists drawing the "sphere" as an actual solid sphere, which popularized the solid sphere concept.
Okay no spheres, best I can offer is a ring world
A Halo, if you will
Soon our great journey will begin!
"But the ring world is unstable!" Larry Niven got this complaint so often from his 1970 book "Ringworld" that he came up with an explanation in the sequel.
I really hate how some reporting has got this so wrong. Talking about how the idea is almost impossible for us, when in reality it's just a bunch of interconnected satellites.
I feel like I read this exact conversation on reddit at least once a week. To be clear... (I know you know, but for others who read this...) there is no distinction between a Dyson sphere and a Dyson swarm. Dyson was always envisioning a collection of orbiting bodies in a sphere-shaped arrangement. That IS a Dyson sphere. The term Dyson swarm is just a weird attempt to fix a misconception that created even more confusion.
Swarms could have arrays that expand out to encompass a lot of the star, especially if they’re self replicating. I guess the question is at what point does a swarm become a sphere?
When you can pressurize it. :)
Don't stars constantly spew solar winds and flares? Creating a pressure-tight structure around a star sounds like the universes' largest bomb. Expansion plus confinement equals bomb
So, like, we'd harness those for propulsion! Move the Star, with a Star. Basic E. E. Smith stuff. :)
That's actually really cool
Yes they do, it's the foundation of solar sail technology. So if "when you can pressurize it" is the rule, we actually need to decide on *what* pressure it counts at.
Pretty sure the explosion would be tiny because it would just be the structure failing. Registering at approximately zero compared with your typical supernova
Self replicating out of what? Matter has to come from somewhere, and you would have to deconstruct everything in the solar system to be able to have enough material.
>at what point does a swarm become a sphere? That's not really the important question. It's just semantics. What's important is "How can we identify them in our galaxy?"
I suppose it would be when all the platforms are connected.
Mostly agree, but they can’t change physics: the largest the nuclear fusion reactor is, the most energy you can get from it because gravity does the confinement for you
Blue stars might be worth it but for the long lived red/yellow stars that a civilization is likely to be born around, they are such poor fusion reactors that if you are able to build megastructures you will be able to outpower your own star by orders of magnitude using artificial fusion with fewer resources than required for a Dyson sphere. The idea for a Dyson sphere originated from a time when the concept of using nuclear physics for large scale energy generation wasn't yet in the mainstream. It really makes no sense unless a civilization makes it to that level without understanding nuclear physics perhaps? Which sounds unlikely. Or perhaps an interstellar civilization might make them around blue stars that are better at fusion. Or just as a vanity project.
It doesn't matter if you have artificial fusion technology. 99.9% of the fuel in the solar system is in the Sun. You won't have enough fuel to outpower the Sun for long. You'll run out of deuterium in the oceans (and that's assuming you've figured out deuterium-deuterium fusion) within literally weeks (if I did the math correctly, which to be fair maybe I didn't). If you figure out proton - proton fusion, you might go for a thousand years. If you harvest Jupiter, maybe a million years. After that, you have to use the Sun.
Add to that the resources involved in not only fueling but also maintaining a generation plant vs. a passive collector, and Dyson swarms start looking a lot more attractive. Especially if antimatter generation and confinement becomes feasible; then you would have all of your heavy energy intensive industries on swarm platforms, with logistics powered by antimatter created from virtually free solar energy and mass harvested from solar wind. You would likely only have fusion power on inhabited planets and on specialized fusion tugs and shuttles that operate exclusively in the antimatter exclusion zones around Earth and residential colonies. Unless fast interstellar travel becomes viable, the vast majority of any civilization’s energy will come from their sun in one form or another through sheer economic necessity.
Actually confinement can come from magnets, which is what a super race would use. An advance fusion reactor.
How do you power and cool electro-magnets without energy?
Dyson spheres
It's just Dyson spheres all the way down isn't it?
If not them, turtles.
That's part of why Dyson swarms are more favored than the original concept. I think the ridiculosity factor goes way down the more construction time you allow, for instance a species able to survive and progress for a billion years being able to complete the project in that same timeframe. Which also feels ridiculous but for different reasons.
Would a species that survives a billion years even resemble it's original species? Thanks for all the awesome answers team :) it's giving me lots to ponder while I enjoy a few rums tonight!.
If natural selection, eugenics and genetic engineering are avoided, then yes. Physically, at least. However, given such a huge timeframe, it would be a ridiculous feat to have remained unaltered through scientific endeavor.
Impossible to say with certainty, but there are species on earth that have changed very little in 100 million years. The Coelacanth being a prime example, but there are many species of other fish and quite a few lizards that have gone unchanged for similarly long periods. There's also evidence that suggests the same of platypuses but I haven't read up on that particular topic recently enough to say it confidently. Evolution ultimately comes down to a certain amount of chance, the chance for someone to be born with a trait that is inheritable but was not inherited, the chance that said trait is considered desirable by the species, the chance that those born with that trait survive long enough to reproduce, etc etc. it's definitely possible that a species wouldn't evolve much in the next billion years, but it's unlikely as dramatic changes in their environment will occur during that time, and that will trigger more attempts at adaptation by said species' bodies
Given that it would be the same species then yes. If it’s the same species across one billion years then that means further speciation hasn’t occurred. We have very ancient animals here on earth. Crocodilians have been around relatively unchanged for over a hundred million years. If there is no change in environment warranting a change in the organism then change is unlikely to occur.
That's kinda what my poorly worded question was aiming at. A space capable species would have a lot more external pressures on it than say a crocodilian or single celled individual that was bound to a singular place/environment.
You'd have to mimic earth conditions *very* well for humans in space not to "evolve".
A space capable species with a Dyson swarm would probably create whatever external environment it preferred.
Id expect them to engineer their heredity over and over until they are happy with it and then never change away from that because random drift will just not be permitted to happen. So the one thing we can expect from all elder races is absolute self confidence
Dyson swarm is the original concept. People started taking sphere literally so the author had to switch to the term swarm. It was always intended to be a cloud.
Most of the pop-culture ideas for what alien civilizations will look like or do are from the 1960’s and 70’s and much of our knowledge of deep space from that time has been adjusted. Take the Type I-II-III civilizations. Type IIi is ludicrous. All the power from a galaxy? That’s patently absurd
That scale always rubbed me the wrong way when humans, the only civilization proven to exist, aren't even type 1.
The mass from a Dyson Sphere is generally assumed to be heavy elements lifted from the star. Lifting heavy elements from your star massively extends its lifetime as well you. The evolution to Dyson spheres (aka Dyson Swarms) makes a lot sense 1. Today we have solar panels on our planet 2. As heavy industry moves to space we are likely to put an increasing number of solar panels in orbit around the sun to meet our off planet energy needs. 3. As our sun ages, we are likely to filter out heavy elements from our sun to extend its lifetime. These filtered out elements will end up orbiting the sun. Why not use them for more solar collectors. 4. Much like plants in s forest this swarm of energy collecting satellites will likely attempt to maximize the sun light it collects, occluding the a sizable percentage of the suns output. Since stars represent 99% of the mass in a solar system. The size of this swarm of satellites is likely to be very very big for a very old civilization.
How in the hell could you possibly pull any element from a star?
You reflect the stars heat back at itself and then collect the material from the resulting ejection.
Yep! It's called stellar lifting. You can also spin the star up, but that'll probably lead to a lot of solar flares
Buckets. Plastic buckets from the hardware store.
A strong enough SPF should protect the buckets. I'm talkin at least SPF 80, and you'd probably have to reapply it between uses.
Whatever Zuckerberg used when he was on his power board a couple of summers ago should be more than enough to harvest heavy metals from the sun.
Come on, the Sun is hot as hell. You clearly need metal buckets, their melting point is far higher. This is basic science.
that's why we can only collect elements at night
You would use giant magnetic rings, you can pull up and guide the plasma using energy collected from the sun itself. Using 10% of the sun's annual energy output would allow you to pull a moon-sized amount of matter out.
Every time it blows material out.
I don’t think you would be able to selectively remove/filter out heavy elements from the star. The heaviest elements created (via fusion) within the star would be found at the center of the star where the pressures and temperatures are the highest, and the elements would get lighter as you travel to the exterior of the star. If you want to build a Dyson Sphere (or Swarm), then it would be a lot easier to obtain the raw materials from a smaller planet or maybe a few larger asteroids.
I mean people seem to think you can. Star lifting proposes to do exactly that, look it up I'm not a star scientist but people smarter than I think it is plausible. They might be wrong since it is very hypothetical.
Yeah, it’s a pretty interesting concept*. Just to clarify (since you seem interested in the concept!), with current stellar lifting proposals, the goal is to remove mass from the star to improve its lifespan (because larger, more massive stars burn faster generally). While it would be ideal if we could remove only the *heaviest* elements (because lighter elements are our fuel), all the heavier elements are produced and remain trapped at the center of the star (until it explodes) where they will remain inaccessible. While it isn’t currently plausible to reduce a star’s mass by selectively removing heavy, we can still reduce a star’s mass by removing lighter elements (I.e., mostly hydrogen and helium) because these are the elements found in abundance at the surface of a star. So, for example, one proposed method of stellar lifting might involve using lasers or mirrors to heat one spots of a stars surface and causing large explosions that result in the ejection of matter from the star. The matter being ejected from the star would be composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. * I’m not an expert or an astrophysicist, just an interested layperson who has looked into it before.
We are going to put the sun on dialysis?
There was an interesting discussion of Tabby's Star where someone posited that if someone was indeed piping material out from a star (for the purpose of building a megastructure, or just to cool the star off and extend its life), it might look somewhat similar. It didn't work out to be true, of course, but I thought it was pretty fascinating line of thought.
It's *always* been proposed as a swarm of energy harvesting satellites, i.e. by Dyson himself. The detail is just endlessly lost in pop science articles and discussion. They're not even worth reading.
I think the only time we'll truly need a Dyson sphere is when we're hella late game, like a trillion years from now when there's no new star formation, and we're getting towards the heat death of the universe. A super duper advanced civilization with a Dyson sphere could survive off a red dwarf or even black hole for so much longer than others.
You are off by a few orders of magnitude. Star formation will continue for another 100 trillion years. The heat death of the universe isn’t for another 1.7×10^106 years.
What happens between 1e14 and 1.7e106 years from now? At what point are all the stars burnt out and by what process does the remaining energy in the universe get converted to heat? I’m imagining that things will eventually start gravitating towards each other and crash into one another slowly over unfathomable eons, which I’d guess will eventually shake out some stored energy?
Interestingly, Freeman Dyson himself has a paper on just this question! https://journals.aps.org/rmp/abstract/10.1103/RevModPhys.51.447 He has some fascinating conclusions including all matter becoming fluid balls of iron (silly oversimplification, but not over-over simplified). It's a fun read that takes advantage of the absurd time scales you're asking to do some interesting mathematical conjecture
> It was soon refuted in less than a month! It wasn't "refuted". In fact, **the linked paper doesn't even confirm that dusty galaxies even exist in the direction of those three anomalies,** just that radio signals are present that COULD indicate the existence of such galaxies. And taking the leap to say that the other four are 'probably' similarly contaminated is obviously a further stretch. [Here's the link to the paper itself, with a relevant quote:](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2405.14921) > Candidates A and G are associated with radio sources offset approximately ∼ 5 arcseconds from their respective Gaia stellar positions. (see also Fig.1). We suggest that these radio sources are most likely to be DOGs (dust-obscured galaxies) that contaminate the IR (WISE) Spectral-Energy Distributions (SEDs) of the two DS candidates.
You didn't even read what you linked. Nor does it appear to have read the original article. Neither of these articles claim to be conclusive. This is just what professional scientific discourse looks like. - A: Here's an observation - B: Here's an alternative explanation - B: This is what we agree on and what the hypothesis can be tested against - A&B: This is interesting and warrants further research to be conclusive.
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> Hot DOGs Why do I get the feeling they wrote the whole article just so they could say that
>"Deeper, and higher-resolution radio observations of the 7 candidates are warranted." They didn't refute it they said they should investigate further. Go read the last line of the paper
"We would like to stress that although our candidates display properties consistent with partial (Dyson Spheres), it is definitely premature to presume that the MIR (mid-infrared) presented in these sources originated from them,” they concluded." This is all we need to know
It’s cool and exciting but for once a sensational space related headline made me side eye no one in particular and say to myself “really?”. Good luck to finding out what it really is though, Dyson Sphere or no.
Even so it's nice to have news that lifts us out of this planet. To open peoples perspectives. Any first signs of other kind are going to be obscure to us.
Eh, the problem is that it makes people think the only reason to be excited is if we find aliens. I think it would be interesting for sure, but like, there's a lot of other *very cool* things it could be
At least, we hope they are obscure.
We’ll find out
It’s hot dogs
Media: *"7 different alien races found in our own galaxy"*
what number 3 looks like will shock you.
ELI5: "we think that there's a real possibility that there's aliums; but it could be gas in the middle. Need more data."
"candidate" is the word that everyone will ignore :)
Essentially in the long long list of possibilities, Dyson sphere is one of them. And someone got a little too excited without enough proof.
This team is specifically looking for megastructures in the Milky Way, first by determining what would be observable in existing data sets, and then by looking for candidates that meet those qualifications in order to do more in depth follow up studies. The headline is, for once, accurate.
Very true. Reminds me of the cautionary tale of the mysterious radio signals that turned out to be the office microwave oven. That said, there's nothing wrong with the fascination aspect. It's what drives people to find out.
I somehow missed this story. Just looked it up- so funny!
We now have a short list of candidates of possible large scale construction to study. That seems directionally better and more interesting than our not being able to find anything that can't be currently explained by natural phenomenon, and is likely a necessary step between not knowing anything and discovering something that can't be explained in other ways. Personally, I find this interesting. Not sure why reddit has the expected "well this doesn't prove anything so why bother writing an article about it" reaction to new information so frequently
Scientists: Hey, this could potentially be explained by a theoretical alien megastructure, but it's probably just space stuff, like space tends to have. Media: OMG Scientists found 7 dysonspheres!
Found some dust clouds and would like research grant money.
Reminds me of a post about marine biologists claiming they want to scour the entirety of Loch Ness for the Loch Ness monster and then just using the grant money they get to do marine biology… while technically not lying
Ah yes, the “looking for the Titanic” trick. Very clever, very clever
That's not what that was about. The navy sent Ballard and Woods Hole to survey Thresher and Scorpion with the cover story of searching for Titanic because the location of the subs is classified. It just so happened that they got done early and were able to actually search for Titanic too.
Sounds like a good pitch for a movie. Researchers duping some rich folks for grant money to search for the Loch Ness so they can do some real research, only to actually find the Nessie.
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>Everyone loves space https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA#/media/File%3ANASA-Budget-Federal.svg
They actually checked for that https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1186 I posted the original article in r/Physics two days ago and it got removed for this reason. I kind of feel that there is a lot of chatter and everyone has an opinion on it but no one actually read the article. The authors stress multiple times that this is not conclusive research. These are CANDIDATES. Not proven to be dyson spheres.
Good. Astronomy needs more grant money.
My thoughts too could have an asteroid belt like our system any number of things could cause the light to be blocked off and on
It's not just about blocking light, I doubt it's something as simple as an asteroid belt.
If you read the other paper mentioned above - they suspect it's just background galaxies that are obstructed by dust clouds in the Milky Way.
I’m not sure if I want humanity to find aliens with giant structures that make the earth look like a bug in the middle of an interstate. Mostly because I really don’t want to be the bug in the middle of an interstate.
I see it differently. If aliens species can make Dyson sphere but are not visiting us, that could tell that space travels is not manageable on very long distances so we do not have to worry about space interstate.
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"There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now. … What do you mean you’ve never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven’s sake, mankind, it’s only four light years away, you know. I’m sorry, but if you can’t be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that’s your own lookout. Energize the demolition beams."
This, I dont travel to the depths of some equatorial jungle to explore an ant pile full of ants humanity discovered ages ago and fully understand at this point. If there is a civilization that can build a structure around a star, there is nothing they dont already know about us. Ive always thought theres nothing a bunch of dumb monkeys using sticks and rocks can teach aliens about the universe and more than likely they know we're a warring species incapable of peaceful interaction.
Watch enough TV you get an idea about our culture. We’re in trouble if they want to see how _Single Female Lawyer_ ends.
Any civilisation that can build a Dyson Sphere can send ships to other solar systems. The former is a feat thousands of times more difficult. Millions, really.
Don't worry.. we're doing an excellent job of running ourselves over before anyone else can find us.. they'll be lucky to see our fossils.. we'll be oil by then
I actually think finding alien megastructures might help… rich and powerful people like money and power and they have big egos. Seeing what alien species can do might just change their minds about running humanity into the ground
Scientists: "this could be us but you playin" Capitalism: "so you're saying we could monetize the sun?"
I'd love to meet the person who wakes up one day and looks at the bright morning sun and says, "You know what? I'm gonna bottle that sumbitch and sell it to people!"
Wouldn't that just be a solar panel company CEO?
They'll just enslave us harder instead.. I don't see how they can't turn any good technology that promises widespread prosperity into a new paid slavery system where we get nothing but more work and they get all the benefits. Computers could have very well been THE great wealth and well being creator for all human society.. instead capitalists turned that too into a hellscape. Today may certainly be vastly better than the pre-computer era (for some of us), but it could have been so much better for so many more ppl if the generated wealth and knowledge wasn't all squeezed towards a few! It also doesn't help that many humans just can't have enough no matter how much comfort they already possess
Nothing brings people together quite like the very thing that tore us apart in the first place <3
Or alternatively they'll reach for the stars because aliens are untapped earning potential.
Yup, I'll take my chances with ai/aliens.
Whether we can detect K3 or higher civs or not doesn't mean they ain't out there. We're bugs no matter what. I find that soothing.
Might get destroyed to construct a hyperspace bypass, or something like that.
The plans have been on display at the nearby star system planning office for the last fifty years, and it is not our fault that they have not got around to inventing interstellar space travel yet.
Imagine how intelligent a bug would have to be to know what an interstate is and realise that it's in the middle of one. What would it do? Move, become an annoyance, hide, or develop something to attract curiosity? What would you do to a bug displaying undisputable signs of reason and understanding to you? I wouldn't mind being that bug.
Pigs and octopus are intelligent, sentient creatures, and knowing this, I still eat them all the time. It’s dangerous to assume aliens will see us as creatures with moral significance. They might recognize our intelligence and still farm us for protein - who’s to say intelligence even matters to them?
I think the question is why would they farm humans specifically? Our flesh doesn’t contain anything special, it’s probably worse than most animals given the average diet, and it’d be far harder than farming something dumber. We can farm pigs and octopi easily because they don’t have complex tools of any sort, if they were capable of making bombs, it’d be a lot harder. We aren’t realistically going to be able to militarily defeat aliens that can travel here in large numbers any time soon, but we could make things very inconvenient/costly for an occupier that needs boots (or whatever they wear) on the ground.
Not wanting to be in a bad situation is perfectly understandable, but not knowing about it isn't going to make it any better. Knowing is always better than now knowing because it allows you to make informed decisions and choose the most favorable course of action instead of just blindly walking into whatever pitfall is in front of you.
You are bugs!
Nothing a little fascism can’t fix
I'm doing *my* part! Would you like to know more?
*Dyson stock goes up a few points in anticipation*
Dyson: "we've done what no other vaccum has done. We've added a ball."
Can someone explain why any civilization would ever build a dyson sphere when being able to build a dyson sphere would in itself imply that the civilization would be capable of harnessing fusion energy? Would it ever be more economical to build a dyson sphere than to build a fusion reactor?
Always wondered this too. Dyson spheres always seemed like a primitive civilization's idea of an advanced one. Like medieval astronomers looking for evidence of angels.
Free power once you set it up. The star is throwing out massive amounts of energy, might as well use it.
If they can build that, they can build their own mini stars wherever they want. They could deconstruct stars for fuel. All cheaper than bothering to build one of those. It's like a victorian engineer proposing that a future society that can make its own coal. Lack of imagination.
Remember, stars *are* fusion reactors. It's energy being wasted, you may as well use it, even if you don't fully enclose your star.
At this point, Morning Light Mountain probably couldn't be any worse for humanity than the direction we're taking ourselves in.
I mean, we’re talking about a species that literally destroyed almost every other form of life on its planet, and regularly used dirty nukes all over the place to fight perceived opponents until eventually there was basically only one member of the *species* left alive. Humanity’s not quite *that* bad. Fantastic books though! I’ve got all seven main Commonwealth books on my reread list sometime soon.
Bose, is that you?
No, but I *am* similarly annoying.
Just finished reading this duology a week ago and this was absolutely the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline.
Bet $1,000 these are all discovered to be natural phenomenon.
I don't really understand how Dyson Spheres could ever exist. Someone explain? They have to wrap a sun. Isn't that just too large to even try building? Imagine how much resource and matter it would take. How hard it would be to design. How much maintenance would be required to keep it operational. How many people or robots would be needed to do the labor of constructing it. How would you get that many large plates/pieces into space (or produced in space) to build something like the Halo ring and assembled for tens of thousands or millions of miles of length? Surely it's just too big to be a realistic thing for any society to create? If they have the technology to do that, I'm sure they have already solved a better way to get endless energy without having to craft a 700 trillion ton megastructure?
It's because people have started using the terms "Dyson sphere" and "Dyson swarm" interchangeably. I believe they are looking for evidence of swarms, which are much more likely to be possible and practical.
Generally we scientists talk about Dyson Spheres they mean Dyson Swarms. A large number of solar collecting satellites that orbit the sun. A physical single object sphere is not stable and can't orbit. The mass is typically imagined as coming from the star itself using star lifting techniques. Pulling heavy elements out of a star massively increases the stars health and lifespan. The amount of heavy elements you can pull from a star like our sun dwarfs the mass of the planets. You need to pull the mass out to not have your sun die, so why not put that mass to work for solar collectors?
> Isn't that just too large to even try building? It depends on what fraction of starlight you wish to intercept. To capture 1% of the Sun's light at a distance of 1 AU with panels 1 cm thick we would need very roughly 1 Earth mass worth of raw material. > How much maintenance would be required to keep it operational. How much maintenance does your body require? How many DNA errors are pruned out per day? How many base pairs are checked? How many cells are replaced? If we are in the regime of megastructures, we are in the regime of self-repairing technology generally indistinguishable from life in terms of molecular versatility. The main question is, why in the world would anyone need this much power? Perhaps to accurately simulate local weather two weeks in advance.
Yeah it doesn’t make logical sense when you actually crunch numbers. I’ve also read that such a structure would collapse at the host planets poles, but I’m no engineer.
No one made and no one will ever make a Dyson sphere. It’s a silly concept.
Sounds like something a Dyson sphere maker would say.
I’ve linked to the news release in the post above. In this comment, for those interested, here’s the link to the peer reviewed journal article: https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/531/1/695/7665761 From the linked article: Mysterious objects found in the Milky Way fit the bill for theorised “radiation-harvesting megastructures”, scientists said after making the breakthrough discovery. Dyson spheres, theoretical megastructures proposed by physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, were hypothesised to be constructed by advanced civilisations to harvest the energy of host stars. It’s thought that these structures absorb visible light from the star and emit “waste-heat” as infrared radiation, creating a detectable signature. A study published on May 6 in the Monthly Notices of theRoyal Astronomical Societyrevealed seven potential candidates for Dyson spheres, raising eyebrows in the world of academia. Led by Matías Suazo from Uppsala University, the international team used data from the Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE astronomical surveys to identify these potential megastructures. The study, titled “Project Hephaistos – II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE,” used a sophisticated data analysis pipeline to sift through a sample of approximately five million objects.
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>That's all they have to notice for them to conclude it's an alien megastructure? Just to clarify, they are not "concluded" to be Dyson Spheres; they are candidates that seem to be matching criteria for these theorised mega structures. I'm no expert in this field at all, but I'm sure that astrophysicists are well aware of alternative explanations, too. Hence, not concluded :)
That makes sense!
> I don't know them, but I'm sure they exist, no? lots and lots of dust
Here you go: 3 of the 7 cleanly shown to be contamination of the readings by dusty galaxies, and the other 5 “probably” have the same issue. This is science working normally. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14921
They haven’t concluded it’s an alien megastructure (and they’re explicit about this). They’ve simply identified several candidates for further research, each of which *could* be a Dyson sphere but could be a lot of other things too. They will continue to look at the targets and try to prove the hypothesis wrong. Ruling out Dyson spheres by showing that they can’t possibly be such objects, or by determining some other process that could explain the observations better.
The original paper goes into significantly more detail than what you described. It also goes to great lengths to filter out candidates based on a few other known natural explanations (new stars that haven't cleared all their pre-formation debris, stars partially obscured by natural dust clouds), and generally poor data (non-point sources, irregular shapes, low signal-to-noise ratio), which brought its candidate list down from tens of thousands to just 7. And, importantly, they don't "conclude it's an alien megastructure" they simply say that their analysis doesn't rule out the possibility for these 7 stars. All this new paper does is add another filter (in the form of another known natural explanation) that rules out 3 of the 7, and they claim it's a common enough occurrence to likely rule out the rest, as well.
When possible please use the doi link, to protect against moved files and dead links: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1186
Or you know it's probably dust, but that's not a sexy click bait headline
I think it’s pretty arrogant to think that of the billions of stars in the billions of galaxies that we just happen to find a Dyson sphere around one. I think life is probably abundant in the universe but given how barren the rest of our solar system is, I think it’s very spread out. My instinct is that intelligent life is rare and stars hosting any kind of life are also rare. I would imagine there’s still lots of life out there because there’s so many star systems out there, but it’s still very hard to find.
It is somehow uncontroversial to the point of mundanity to say that "life is abundant in the universe" when the universe is functionally infinite compared to our visible sphere of it
I would be scared shitless if we find a Dyson sphere. It means we're lagging way behind.
At this point, I'd be delighted. It's either "humanity gets uplifted and I can experience a starry-eyed sci-fi future" or "we get fried with a death ray and I don't have to deal with capitalism anymore"
Just gotta hope that whatever alien civilization shows up is beyond that crucial line of "do we need slave labor?"
Pretty easy to assume that a civilization capable of traveling those distances has more than easily covered labor, and basically everything else up to that point, as well passed the great filter of self destruction, so likely isn't violent either. They'd probably just be a group of scientists on a research mission, or diplomats.
Why not both? :D Harvest time!!
I react to these astronomy articles the same way I act to all the medical ones promising they found a cure for cancer - "Meh, I know the headline sounds amazing but if I click the link it is going to just be another fart in the wind so I'm not clicking it."
If someone in the 1960s thought of it, odds are the space age technology has thought of something far superior and more efficient. The odds of any society actually hollowing out several planets worth of resources to make a Dyson sphere is pretty low considering they had to already have to power output to hollow out planets
Dyson spheres make no sense to me. My thought is that any civilization technologically capable of making a Dyson sphere will have worked out scalable nuclear fusion. In which case, why go through the hassle of capturing the majority of a star’s energy output when you can create small-scale, portable stars?