Dyson spheres: Could alien megastructures exist in the Milky Way? Scientists found 7 places to look

Sign up for CNN’s Wonder Theory science newsletter. Still, coming from a thinker who some in the scientific community say might have been worthy of a Nobel Prize early in his career, the concept took hold and the hypothetical megastructures became known as Dyson spheres, even though the physicist later clarified that they would actually consist of “a loose collection or swarm of objects traveling on independent orbits around the star.” In his paper, Dyson also noted that Dyson spheres would give off waste heat detectable as infrared radiation, and suggested that looking for that byproduct would be a viable method for searching for extraterrestrial life. Now, a new study that looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially be hosting Dyson spheres — a finding that’s attracting scrutiny and alternate theories. “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 candidates Matías has found are important because whatever they are — and they are likely stars surrounded by material from some sort of rare event, like a planetary collision, although they could be Dyson spheres — they are rare and interesting objects worthy of further study, for instance by the James Webb Space Telescope.” Broken spheres Dyson died in 2020 before any of his spheres could be found — although they are just one of a dozen ideas that bear his name.