Alien Elon Musks could be surrounding distant stars with millions of satellites.
Boffins think they have spotted tell-tale signs extra-terrestrials are using them to harvest energy to power their advanced civilisations. They surveyed millions of stars and found seven they think could be orbited by so-called Dyson swarms.
The concept was floated in the 1960s by scientist Freeman Dyson who thought aliens would need so much energy they’d have to build constellations of SpaceX-style satellites around stars to collect it.
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Astronomers at Uppsala University in Sweden spotted dozens of stars within 900 light years giving off more infra-red radiation than they should – a sign of possible “mega-structures.”
They then whittled them down to seven they think need to be investigated further, possibly using the Webb Space Telescope.
A paper from the Project Hephaistos team, led by Matias Suazo, said: “There are several natural explanations for the infrared excess… but none of them clearly explains such a phenomenon in the candidates.”
Some of the stars – from red dwarfs to others the size of our sun – shed 60 times more infra-red radiation than expected.
The first possible Dyson Swarm was spotted back in 2015.
Boffins say they can’t explain why the so-called Tabby’s Star keeps dimming and brightening, and they haven’t ruled out the possibility it’s surrounded by massive alien machines.
It comes after the Daily Star reported how the tech tycoon made the audacious claim that humans could be living in a city on Mars within the next 30 years.
The SpaceX boss took to his X platform to respond to a tweet declaring “we are just a few years away from landing on Mars”. The 52-year old entrepreneur said: “Less than 5 years for uncrewed, less than 10 to land people, maybe a city in 20 years, but for sure in 30, civilization secured.”
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