Seminar: Dyson sphere candidates from Project Hephaistos

The quest to find intelligent extraterrestrial life has captivated humanity for a long time, and various strategies have been developed to search for signs of advanced civilizations. One approach involves looking for indirect evidence of extraterrestrial technology, such as Dyson spheres. These are hypothetical megastructures constructed by advanced civilizations that would encompass a star to harness its energy and could be detected by waste heat infrared radiation. Missions such as Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE provide extensive observations that can be utilized to identify the potential observational signatures of Dyson spheres, which include optical dimming and an infrared excess. In this talk, we present three key aspects of the largest search for Dyson spheres up to date. First, we present the latest upper limits on their prevalence in the Milky Way. Then, we present a pipeline that has been developed with the purpose of identifying sources exhibiting unusual infrared radiation not easily attributable to known astronomical sources and also compatible with Dyson sphere models. Finally, we present the top candidates yielded by the pipeline for which we derive their stellar parameters and discuss potential explanations for their infrared excess.

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We shall leave for lunch at around 12:15. There will be fika after the seminar.