Project Hephaistos - II. Dyson sphere candidates from Gaia DR3, 2MASS, and WISE

TL;DR

This paper presents a comprehensive search for partial Dyson spheres using Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE data, employing a neural network pipeline that identified seven promising M-dwarf candidates with unexplained infrared excess.

Contribution

It introduces a new multi-filter pipeline with neural network assistance to efficiently identify potential Dyson sphere candidates in large astronomical datasets.

Findings

Seven candidates with infrared excess identified

All candidates are M-dwarfs with unexplained IR emission

Pipeline effectively filters out false positives

Abstract

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is currently being pursued using multiple techniques and in different wavelength bands. Dyson spheres, megastructures that could be constructed by advanced civilizations to harness the radiation energy of their host stars, represent a potential technosignature, that in principle may be hiding in public data already collected as part of large astronomical surveys. In this study, we present a comprehensive search for partial Dyson spheres by analyzing optical and infrared observations from Gaia, 2MASS, and WISE. We develop a pipeline that employs multiple filters to identify potential candidates and reject interlopers in a sample of five million objects, which incorporates a convolutional neural network to help identify confusion in WISE data. Finally, the pipeline identifies 7 candidates deserving of further analysis. All of these objects are M-dwarfs, for which astrophysical phenomena cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission.