Gigantic ‘alien megastructures’ built by an advanced civilisation could be orbiting around dozens of nearby stars.
And we could finally answer question of whether we’re alone in the universe by pointing telescopes at ‘pulsar’ stars.
Last year, scientists suggested they had discovered an “alien megastructure” orbiting a distant star, when they observed unexplained “winking” behaviour of a far-off sun called Tabby’s Star that may have been caused by the rotation of a gigantic craft called a Dyson’s Sphere.
Now an astronomer, Zaza Osmanov. working at the Free University of Tbilisi, Georgia, has suggested these gigantic solar power plants might be relatively easy to spot using current technology. And that researchers should focus on 64 pulsar stars which are relatively close to Earth to search for alien megastructures.
Are Dyson Spheres Pulsar Stars?
Rapidly rotating pulsars are very powerful and harvesting their energy would be quite profitable, but a habitable zone would be much farther and mass of a material required for constructing the mega-ring would exceed the total mass of all planets, asteroids, comets, centaurs and interplanetary dust in a typical planetary system by several orders of magnitude.
Now, listen to the sound of a pulsar star:
What are Dyson’s spheres?
These theoretical “megastructures” were dreamed up in the 1960s, when Freeman Dyson and Nikolai Kardashev suggested an advanced civilisation would inevitably seek to build a huge structure around a star to harvest its massive power.
If an alien civilisation is powerful enough to build a Dyson’s Sphere, it’s also probably strong enough to wipe out humanity, don’t you think?
