![]() ![]() ![]() The rest would be radiated into space as heat, which would look especially bright in the infrared. Giant structures around a star would absorb a lot of energy, not all of which could be used by the civilization that built them. “One should expect that, within a few thousand years of its entering the stage of industrial development, any intelligent species should be found occupying an artificial biosphere which completely surrounds its parent star,” he wrote. One imagined megastructure-a sphere or ring of giant panels built around stars to capture as much of their energy as possible-is named the Dyson Sphere for the physicist Freeman Dyson who popularized the concept in a 1960 Science article. He suggested a search for the excess infrared radiation such structures would produce.Īn alien megastructure could make stars appear unusually bright. Physicist Freeman Dyson speculated in 1960 that advanced civilizations could build massive structures around stars to harness their energy, as in this artist’s conception. Even if these four phenomena aren’t the products of alien civilizations, they illustrate that the universe can be pretty weird all on its own. But we’ve asked them to use their powers of imagination and extrapolation to suggest how the four examples listed here might be indications of intelligent life. But the most intriguing section catalogs anomalies: strange, unexplained objects such as “puffy” planets, slow-spinning pulsars, interstellar asteroids, fast radio bursts from beyond the Milky Way, and dozens more.Īstronomers say they’re likely to discover natural (if bizarre) explanations for them. A smaller section lists the superlatives: the biggest, the hottest, the brightest, the farthest. Most of the catalog is a “one-of-everything” compilation, from rocky planets to blue-straggler stars. But at the same time, one doesn’t want to neglect the possibility that it could be going on.”Įarlier this year, to help locate possible targets for future searches-whether for signals or artifacts-Breakthrough Listen released the first cut of its Exotica Catalog, a listing of almost 800 astronomical objects. So one doesn’t want to immediately leap to that solution for any newly discovered astronomical phenomenon. “We have no evidence for technologically capable life anywhere else in the universe. “It’s a fine line,” says Andrew Siemion, director of the Berkeley SETI Research Center and the principal investigator of Breakthrough Listen. Breakthrough Listen, the largest SETI initiative to date, is thinking even bigger, searching for sophisticated engineering projects that span entire star systems or even galaxies (see “Signs,” Feb./Mar. NASA recently awarded a grant to a SETI project that will seek out signs of alien “technosignatures,” such as solar panel arrays on distant exoplanets. What could they build? Maybe they could re-engineer a star system.” “The universe has been around for three times as long as the Earth has been around, so there could be aliens out there that are very, very much more advanced than we are-not just 1,000 years, but millions and billions of years ahead. “It’s worthwhile to not just do what was done 60 years ago, but also to keep an eye out for very unusual things,” says Shostak. ![]() Now scientists engaged in the search think it’s time for a change. He and others pointed radio antennas at star systems likely to have planets and listened. A SETI founder, Drake assumed that because life developed on Earth, it would be most likely found on planets like ours orbiting stars like our sun. “SETI researchers do exactly what Frank Drake did in the first SETI experiment 60 years ago,” says Shostak. More recently, he notes, a weirdly dimming object called Tabby’s Star inspired theories of alien life, before astronomers solved the puzzle.īut what about the many puzzles in the universe that astronomers have not yet solved? Recently, scientists engaged in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) have suggested that it’s time to look-as well as listen-for advanced civilizations. Within a year, the theoreticians figured out what they were”- rapidly rotating compact stars emitting radiation like lighthouses. When pulsars were discovered in the 1960s, says Seth Shostak, the senior astronomer at the SETI Institute in California, “they were first called LGMs, for ‘little green men’ by the Cambridge astronomers who found them because they didn’t know what they were. Aware of this history, some astronomers have found humor in it. Percival Lowell thought he saw canals on Mars. As long as astronomers have gazed at the stars and planets, there has been the temptation to see the handiwork of intelligent life when there is no other apparent explanation.īabylonians believed eclipses to be omens sent by gods. ![]()
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