What was suggested as a hypothesis several decades ago might have been found to be real

A hypothesis put forward decades ago may have been proven to be right.

In 1960, British-American physicist Freeman Dyson came up with the idea that advanced civilizations could build megastructures that would harness radiation energy from their host stars in space.

This concept went on to be named the Dyson sphere and a key thing to note about the late scientist’s theory was that the so-called spheres would likely give off ‘waste heat detectable as infrared radiation’.

At the time Dyson penned his paper on the topic, he suggested that looking for this byproduct could help future researchers searching for extraterrestrial life.

George Dyson, Dyson’s son who is a technology writer and author, explained to CNN: “Scientists (at the time) were largely receptive, not to the likelihood that alien civilisations would be found to exist, but that a search for waste heat would be a good place to look.”

Now, with modern-day technology on their side, scientists set out to search for Dyson spheres by using historical data from telescopes that pick up infrared signatures.

They attempted to pinpoint potential Dyson spheres by looking for infrared heat near stars that couldn’t be explained in any other way – and they found some.

Dyson suggested there may be such thing as alien megastructures. (3D Illustration Getty Images/NASA)

Lead study author Matías Suazo, a doctoral student in the department of physics and astronomy of Uppsala University in Sweden, said of their findings: “We started with a sample of 5 million stars, and we applied filters to try to get rid of as much data contamination as possible.”

He went on to add that it currently isn’t confirmed that what they’ve come across are definitely Dyson spheres.

“So far, we have seven sources that we know are glowing in the infrared but we don’t know why, so they stand out,” Suazo explained.

As per his study, which was published last month, the seven objects of interest are M-dwarfs – a low mass star that’s smaller than the sun.

The new study looked at 5 million stars in the Milky Way galaxy. (Getty Stock Images)

The glowing infrared could indeed by a signal of Dyson spheres, but some natural causes could eventually disqualify the candidates.

Basically the findings are very intriguing, but we shouldn’t get our hopes up just yet.

While those at Uppsala University found only seven potential candidates, the International School for Advanced Studies in Italy identified 53 stars with excess mid-infrared measurements, Popular Mechanics reported.

But the news outlet suggested that both studies’ findings could be a result of Extreme Debris Disks if not Dyson spheres.