Scientists Say Aliens Could Make Megastructures Around Black Holes, Build Civilizations

While some scientists try to figure out if aliens exist somewhere out there in space, a team of researchers lead by National Tsing Hua University astronomer Tiger Yu-Yang Hsiao is looking into a particular specific form of hypothetical martian construction project.

Vice News said Hsiao's team is looking for proof of Dyson spheres, which are hypothetical alien megastructures around black holes. . For the paper, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers explained that processes would justify its construction.

A typical Dyson sphere is an artificial structure surrounding a star and collecting a significant amount of its power production, IFL Science explained. But the researchers advocated hunting for an "inverse Dyson sphere" (IDS) that may drain electricity from a black hole in the same way.

"Overall, a black hole can be a promising source and is more efficient than harvesting from a main sequence star," said Hsiao's team in the study. He also mentioned in an online tabloid that black holes could produce 100,000 to one million times the energy of living stars.

The team claimed that because a black hole's energy output dwarfs that of a star, waste heat from an IDS may "be spotted by our present observatories."

No known metal could endure the temperatures of a black hole accretion disk or the plasma jets that fly out into space from them, according to Vice.

However, because black holes release a lot of radiation, the researchers warned Cosmos Magazine that signals from a Dyson sphere could get lost in the noise.

They propose that the radial velocity approach, which is currently employed to detect exoplanets by detecting the minute gravitational wobble of their stars, may be used to corroborate observations.

The researchers are emphasizing that the study "only discusses civilizations that were born and raised from other stars."

Building an IDS would be a big design and safety problem, as black holes are dangerous and explosive objects, according to the authors. Because no known metal can sustain the tremendous temperatures of disks and jets, alien civilizations would have to rely on unusual technology to extract energy from them.

"We speculate that this kind of [alien] civilisation can collect the energy remotely or treat the energy source as a power station rather than living around a black hole with a harsh environment," the team stated.

"Therefore, throughout the paper, we do not discuss whether the temperature and the gravity of our configurations are suitable for life."

Hsiao and his team is already looking at actual galaxy surveys and creating models of what such structures may look like, in the hopes of assisting astronomers in detecting Dyson swarms if they exist.