Scientists carried out a survey of five million distant solar systems with the help of 'neural network' algorithms and it took an interesting turn when they found nearly 60 stars surrounded by what appeared as "giant alien power plants."

Among the 60 stars, seven of them - which were M-dwarf stars and ranged between 60 per cent and 8 per cent the size of the Sun - were seen releasing high infrared 'heat signatures,' as per the astronomers. //

While these structures are named for Freeman Dyson, a physicist and mathematician who proposed the building of a Dyson sphere to contain and capture all of a star's energy output, the concept actually goes back to a 1937 novel, Star Maker, by author Olaf Stapledon.

But as far as this study actually having detected such structures? Color me skeptical. //

What isn't said is what other explanations might cause these mid-infrared emissions; while I'm a biologist and not a cosmologist, it seems to me that a G-sequence star like our sun, were it to be surrounded by a cloud (or clouds) of gas or dust, may well also emit such an IR signature. And that's a lot more likely than an alien civilization that would by necessity be thousands, or millions of years ahead of us, technologically. //

Cliff-Hanger
3 hours ago
Ward, I'm a little disappointed. Dyson structures mentioned and not one bad pun about vacuum cleaners sucking the energy out of the stars.