Astronomers believe they have discovered seven potential candidates for Dyson spheres that could have been created by alien civilizations.
Scientists continue to search for alien civilizations, even though they have not yet succeeded. The authors of a new study published in the Monthly Bulletins of the Royal Academy of Sciences believe that technosignatures of potential aliens in the form of Dyson spheres may have already been discovered.
A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical structure that could only be built by a highly advanced civilization. Such structures must be created around stars to harness all their energy.
According to the famous Kardashev scale, only a Type II civilization could create something like this. As Focus has already written, scientists believe that humanity has not even reached the level of Type I civilization.
Dyson spheres could be technosignatures that could be used to detect the existence of an alien civilization, scientists say. They developed a method to find them and successfully applied it in practice.
Scientists analyzed data from space and ground-based telescopes about various stars. In total, this data consists of 5 million infrared light sources.
Using a new data processing method, the scientists looked for partially completed Dyson bulbs that should emit excess infrared radiation. That is, this structure must emit unnecessary heat in the form of mid-range infrared radiation.
The problem is that these aren’t the only objects that can do this. The same radiation can be produced, for example, by rings of dust surrounding stars. But analysis of the data revealed sources exhibiting an abnormal excess of infrared radiation that cannot be attributed to any known natural source of such radiation.
As a result, of the approximately 5 million original objects, only 7 potential Dyson spheres remain, and scientists believe that is what they are.
But for now, these structures have the status of candidates for the title of Dyson spheres, as there may be other reasons for the emission of excess infrared radiation. These could be the same dust disks around stars.
But candidates for the title Dyson spheres are located around red dwarf stars of spectral class M. And such dusty disks are very rare around such stars.
The next phase of the research will be to determine more precisely what astronomers have discovered. In this way it is possible to determine the source of infrared radiation.
