Possibilities
The authors of the study, published May 6 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, specifically set out to search for Dyson spheres, in the form of infrared heat near stars that couldn’t be explained in any other way.
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Using historical data from telescopes that pick up infrared signatures, the research team looked at stars located within less than 1,000 light-years from Earth: “We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible,” said lead study author Matias Suazo, a doctoral student in the department of physics and astronomy of Uppsala University in Sweden.
“So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don’t know why, so they stand out.”
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There is no conclusive evidence that the seven stars have Dyson spheres around them, Suazo cautioned.
“It’s difficult for us to find an explanation for these sources, because we don’t have enough data to prove what is the real cause of the infrared glow,” he said. “They could be Dyson spheres, because they behave like our models predict, but they could be something else as well.”
Among the natural causes that could explain the infrared glow are an unlucky alignment in the observation, with a galaxy in the background overlapping with the star, planetary collisions creating debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris from which planets would later form.
The data used by the researchers comes from two active space telescopes — the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, from NASA and Gaia from the European Space Agency — as well as an astronomical survey of the sky in infrared light called The Two Micron All Sky Survey. Also known as 2MASS, the collaboration between the University of Massachusetts and the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory took place between 1997 and 2001.
