Yes, I said alien structures, and I know what you're thinking, but just stay with me here.

Because the basic idea was this, superior intelligent life might build big structures around their home stars or planets as a way to harness or reuse that energy.

A 1960s physicist who came up with this idea, Freeman Dyson, argued that if these structures existed, there'd be so much energy that human scientists on Earth could probably spot it because it would emit a lot of infrared radiation.

So in this new study, researchers say they found seven sources glowing in the infrared, those are their words, but couldn't find an obvious explanation for why these sources are glowing so much, which could mean they're Dyson spheres or something else entirely.

And what I'm saying is, what?

Space is so crazy.

I wish I understood it better.

So let's talk to a scientist to help wrap our heads around this.

I'm joined now by Professor Jana Levin.

She is an astrophysicist and author of the book, Black Hole Survival Guide, as well as the Clare Toe Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Bernard College of Columbia University.

Professor, first of all, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

I tried to explain it a little bit.

That was my very dirty version.

I was going to be like, yeah, but I'm an English major who just had Google.

You have a PhD in physics from MIT.

So how do you explain Dyson spheres?

I think there was an excellent explanation.

If you look at where we are relative to the sun, we're very far away.

We're the third planet in.

And imagine the light that we try to collect, let's say, with solar panels on people's homes or on any roofs to collect that energy.

Imagine if you got really close and you caught everything the sun was emitting.

It's just a tremendous amount of power.

And so Freeman Dyson was thinking about this.

Actually, he was originally inspired by sci-fi written by Olaf Stapleton like decades earlier.

And his idea wasn't so much a solid sphere.

It was really like satellites in orbit, a network of things that would be orbiting and would essentially what we would now say have solar panels and are collecting that energy.

So what do you make of this study?

Generally speaking, I guess, do you think it's possible that these are the elusive Dyson spheres?

So I think it's very unlikely, but I'm open.

We have to be open as scientists.

If we think we know the answer before we go and observe, then we're already defeated.

I think it's terribly unlikely, but it's extremely exciting and interesting to think about.

And it's fun to think about.

What's probably going to happen is we're going to look at this infrared signature that you mentioned and we're going to find out that there's a natural cause.

So a lot of things emit heat in the infrared.

You know, infrared goggles allow us to see human bodies and the heat of human bodies.

And it's not that dissimilar that when we look in the infrared, we see things emitting heat.

So the idea was if we had this very technologically advanced civilization, like thousands of years beyond where we are right now, and they could build such a thing and it was collecting all this energy, it would collect also some heat and would have to cool off and we would see that in the infrared.

But there are other natural possibilities that could explain.

What do you think those possibly could be?

Oh, it could be a very young star that still has some material around it in kind of a disk.

And that's how planets form.

Planets coalesce out of these early disks and those can emit in the infrared.

It could be that there's actually an entire galaxy in the distance behind the star.

We're seeing that galaxy.

We can't disambiguate those.

Or it could be planetary collisions.

I mean, there are natural explanations, but I think it's worth noting.

We're looking just a thousand light years around us.

That sounds far, but it's actually really close.

That's our backyard.

The entire Milky Way galaxy is a hundred thousand light years across.

And there are probably more planets in the Milky Way galaxy than there are stars.

So we're talking of hundreds of billions and maybe trillions of planets out there.

And I think we're in an era where we think the emergence of life is possibly inevitable elsewhere, that we're not the only example.

Now whether or not they've survived with thousands of years of industrial advancement to build a Dyson sphere is a different story.

Yeah.

Do you think there is a scenario where a Dyson sphere might actually exist?

Or do you think this is really just the stuff of sci-fi fantasy?

I think it's feasible, unlikely.

If you look at where we are since the Industrial Revolution, it's only a couple hundred years.

We're in a precarious position.

We have climate change.

We have struggles with nuclear power, nuclear weapons that could be destructive.

It's unclear that any species that makes it that advanced could survive far enough into their own future to be able to build a Dyson sphere.

But there are optimists out there who say we'll find a way.

Yeah, right.

The universe is a pretty big place, right?

And it'd be a shame if it was just a seems like a lot of waste of space.

That would be a real shame.

All right, Professor.

Thank you so much for being here.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks for watching.

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