Alien believers, gather around.
Scientists believe they might have found potential signs of alien structures around stars. These huge structures, called Dyson spheres, could allow aliens to draw huge amounts of power from stars.
If such objects exist, they should release a detectable infrared glow, known as a technosignature.
Under Project Hephaistos, astronomers from Uppsala University in Sweden and the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy analysed data from the ESA's Gaia satellite, the 2MASS sky survey and NASA’s Wise satellite.
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The researchers used data from satellites to study five million stars and found not one, but seven unusual ones.
Dr. Matías Suazo of Uppsala University and his team spotted odd signals from seven red dwarfs within 900 light-years of Earth.
They appeared to be around 60 times brighter in infrared than normal - which suggests something big.
‘All of these objects are M-dwarfs, for which astrophysical phenomena cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission,’ the researchers wrote.
'This structure would emit waste heat in the form of mid-infrared radiation that, in addition to the level of completion of the structure, would depend on its effective temperature.'
Physicist Freeman Dyson first proposed the idea in 1960. He theorised that an advanced civilisation would be able to build a shell around a star to capture a large portion of its power.
If it was aliens, it's probable that the signals could come from a Dyson swarm – a group of large satellites circling a star to harvest its energy.
Further results from the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy identified 53 similar cases among bigger stars, like our Sun as far as 6,500 light-years away from Earth.
However, for the less exciting part, there might be more ordinary explanations behind these infrared signatures.
One natural explanation is that these stars are surrounded by hot debris from planet formation, though the researches presume the stars to be too old for this.
‘None of them clearly explains such a phenomenon in the candidates, especially given that all are M dwarfs,’ the researchers wrote.
Another simpler theory is that these stars might just be aligned with distant galaxies that are giving off the infrared glow.
Either way, the scientists want to study these stars more to find out what's really going on, and who knows? They might even find aliens.