A team of astronomers combed through a collection of odd stars that are candidates for Dyson spheres — artificial constructs designed by aliens to leech energy from stars. Instead, the scientists found, the weird stars are more likely to be "hot DOGs" — hot dust-obscured galaxies.
In early 2024, astronomers combed through more than 5 million stars from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Gaia and 2MASS sky surveys, searching for stars that seemed to have excess infrared radiation. According to the researchers, this extra infrared signal could be interpreted as the signature of a Dyson sphere.
