Dyson’s spheres were an exciting retreat in the search for alien intelligence. Recently, seven stars, most of which radiate in the infrared range, were identified as potential candidates.

This is potentially a heat signature from the spacecraft matrix around the star, but unfortunately the new paper has a different, slightly less exciting explanation; dust hid galaxies.

There are several ways to hunt for aliens, and one of them is to look for signs of large-scale projects in space. Enter Dyson’s Sphere. This idea was first proposed by Freeman Dyson in 1960 to explain how advanced civilizations would place energy harvesters and even habitats around a star to harness its power.

Eventually, such an infrastructure would likely surround the entire star, and Dyson suggested that a signature such as excess infrared radiation could be detected.

The results of the Hephaestus project detected seven M-type stars from a sample of 5 million stars detected by Gaia. The astrometric satellite has been used to map stars in the Milky Way and has been of great benefit to many studies.

Data from 2MASS (Two Micron All-Sky Survey) and WISE (Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) were also used to identify stars that appeared to exhibit the expected infrared excess.

In a recent paper by lead author Tongtian Ren and his team, they explore the project’s findings and explore the possible nature of candidate sites. The team compared information from Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS) data and several other radio sky surveys.

They searched for radio sources within 10 arcseconds of candidate Gaia positions. Note that the diameter of the Full Moon is 1860 arcseconds.

Radio sources were found for three candidates named A, B and G. The sources’ accuracy was within 4.9, 0.4, and 5 arcseconds, respectively, and candidate G was found in several radio searches. The team concluded that these seven stars were most likely Dyson spheres, an extragalactic phenomenon. The most likely explanation is a distant galaxy covered in dust!

The presence of dust can contaminate the distribution of infrared energy in the spectrum of the two objects. Another candidate, candidate B, is also thought to be a distant galaxy, but was within view of an M-type dwarf star.

Much like Candidates A and B, Candidate G has a spectrum that reveals loud, radioactive galactic nuclei with outward superluminal jets. The galaxies are likely to be distant quasars that emit enormous amounts of radiation, but obscuring clouds of hot dust obscure most of the radiation other than the infrared.

What about the other four candidates? So far no suitable radio source has been found. This doesn’t mean that the hot, dust-shrouded galaxy model isn’t an adequate explanation; It just means that high-resolution radio imaging is required. Of course, it could also be possible that these are actually technology spheres around distant stars. As much as I want it to be true, there is no evidence of this yet.