At least seven stars in the Milky Way show signs of potentially harboring a hypothetical, super-advanced form of alien technology known as a Dyson sphere, scientists claim. While the researchers can not be totally sure that these stars host intelligent civilizations, they will undoubtedly pique the interest of scientists searching for extraterrestrial life in the cosmos.
While scientists argue over the likelihood of a civilization ever becoming advanced enough to construct such behemothic structures, researchers think that if Dysons spheres do exist, we should probably be able to spot them. This is because, if a Dyson sphere did surround an alien star, the heat from that star would cause the sphere to heat up and emit large amounts of infrared radiation.
All seven stars highlighted by the study are M-dwarf stars — a class of main sequence stars that are smaller and dimmer than the sun. They are all located within 1,000 light-years of Earth, researchers wrote in the study. By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.This is not the only recent study to identify potential IEEs. A near-identical study, which was uploaded March 27 to the preprint server arXiv, also analyzed around 5 million stars surveyed by Gaia, WISE and 2MASS and found 53 potential IEE candidates. However, it is unclear if both studies analyzed the same data set. The March paper has not been peer-reviewed.