Mysterious objects in space may be evidence of the existence of life outside Earth

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Scientists seek to search for life outside Earth, adopting innovative methods. A scientific team says it may have discovered evidence of this in the form of Dyson casings.

The "Dyson envelope" is known as a huge hypothetical structure that completely surrounds the star and captures a large percentage of its released energy, which is a way through which advanced aliens can derive huge amounts of energy.

If such objects exist, they should emit a detectable infrared glow, also known as a technosignature.

In a collaboration known as Project Hephaestus, teams of astronomers from Uppsala University in Sweden and the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy collected data from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, the 2MASS Sky Survey and NASA's WISE satellite.

Astronomers examined 5 million stars, up to 6,500 light-years away. They found similar signs of excess infrared heat that cannot be explained by known natural processes of radiation.

After examining the enormous data, the international team of scientists was able to identify seven giant “Dyson shells” lurking in the universe. These giant objects are described as a virtual engineering achievement that only a civilization much more advanced than ours would be able to build.

This assumption was proposed by physicist and astronomer Freeman J. Dyson in 1960, who envisioned these objects as a solar system-sized structure consisting of a "swarm of objects" that could travel in independent orbits around a star like our Sun.

The idea is that the aliens who control this multi-faceted field will use it to harness the star's energy to meet the spiraling energy needs of its technologically advanced individuals.

Now, the international group of scientists say they've figured out how to detect technical signatures from Dyson's potential field, and they've dubbed their effort Project Hephaistos.

The findings from the International School of Advanced Studies in Italy found 53 candidates among the more massive stars, including some Sun-like stars at distances that could be up to 6,500 light-years from Earth.

Then they subjected the list of nominated stars to further filtering. Here, Dr. Mathias Suazo from Uppsala University and his team detected strange signals from seven M-type red dwarfs 900 light-years from Earth, which appeared about 60 times brighter in the infrared than expected.

Up to 16% of each star must be covered to calculate the signals. If they are aliens, the signals are likely to be something known as a Dyson swarm, which is a group of large satellites orbiting a star to collect energy.

The scientists concluded that these “seven apparent M-type dwarfs show an infrared increase of an indistinct nature consistent with models of Dyson shells.”

The scientists noted that pursuing optical spectroscopy would help to better understand these seven sources. They stressed that "additional analyzes are necessary to reveal the true nature of these sources."