Have Scientists Found 'Potential Evidence' of Dyson Spheres?

Have scientists discovered infrared radiation, evidence of waste heat generated by the energy-harvesting star-surrounding spheres first proposed by British American physicist Freeman Dyson? CNN reports:[A] new study that looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy suggests that seven candidates could potentially be hosting Dyson spheres - a finding that's attracting scrutiny and alternate theories... Using historical data from telescopes that pick up infrared signatures, the research team looked at stars located within less than 1,000 light-years from Earth: "We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible," said lead study author Matias Suazo, a doctoral student in the department of physics and astronomy of Uppsala University in Sweden. "So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don't know why, so they stand out...." Among the natural causes that could explain the infrared glow are an unlucky alignment in the observation, with a galaxy in the background overlapping with the star, planetary collisions creating debris, or the fact that the stars may be young and therefore still surrounded by disks of hot debris from which planets would later form... An earlier study, published in March and using data from the same sources as the new report, had also found infrared anomalies among a sample dataset of 5 million stars in our galaxy. "We got 53 candidates for anomalies that cannot be well explained, but can't say that all of them are Dyson sphere candidates, because that's not what we are specifically looking for," said Gabriella Contardo, a postdoctoral research fellow at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, who led the earlier study. She added that she plans to check the candidates against Suazo's model to see how many tie into it. "You need to eliminate all other hypotheses and explanations before saying that they could be a Dyson sphere," she added. "To do so you need to also rule out that it's not some kind of debris disk, or some kind of planetary collision, and that also pushes the science forward in other fields of astronomy - so it's a win-win." Both Contardo and Suazo agree that more research is needed on the data, and that ultimately they could turn to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope for more information, as it is powerful enough to observe the candidate stars directly. However, because of the lengthy, competitive procedures that regulate use of the telescope, securing access might take some time. CNN adds that "A May 23 paper published in response to the one by Suazo and his colleagues suggests that at least three of the seven stars have been 'misidentified' as Dyson spheres and could instead be 'hot DOGs' - hot dust-obscured galaxies - and that the remaining four could probably be explained this way as well." But "As for Dyson himself, if he were still alive, he also would be highly skeptical that these observations represent a technological signature, his son George argued: 'But the discovery of new, non-technological astronomical phenomena is exactly why he thought we should go out and look.' "

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