ALIENS? JWST Just Examined Two Stars Suspected of Harboring Dyson Spheres. Here’s What It Found.
“A civilization can hide its star behind a shell of solar collectors, but thermodynamics always collects its tax, and all that captured starlight has to come back out as a warm mid-infrared glow.”
That glow would be unavoidable. Just as a laptop or lightbulb gives off waste heat, so too would any machine that harvests a star’s energy. The larger the hypothetical megastructure, the brighter that excess infrared radiation should become.
That excess is exactly what Project Hephaistos, led by astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson of Uppsala University in Sweden, set out to find. Even false positives could teach us how to better search for alien tech – by revealing the many ways the Universe can mimic it.
The search sifted through roughly five million Milky Way stars looking for exactly this kind of infrared excess – more mid-infrared light than an ordinary star should produce.
Seven stars survived the team’s increasingly stringent tests, with the two studied here emerging as the search’s most compelling candidates.
JWST quickly exposed the two candidates as Dyson sphere impostors – and the explanation was brilliantly simple. The light from both stars was being boosted by a distant galaxy almost perfectly lined up behind them.
So not aliens then.
