Matías Suazo
December 7, 2023
Zoom recording
Abstract:
The quest for finding 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, hypothetical megastructures constructed by advanced civilizations that would encompass a star to harness its energy. This structure would potentially emit detectable 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 a pipeline to gather sources that exhibit unusual infrared radiation not easily attributable to known astronomical sources and compatible with our Dyson sphere models. We present our top candidates and, in a few cases, optical spectroscopy. Finally, we discuss potential explanations for the infrared excess.