A Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star and captures a large percentage of its power output. The concept is a thought experiment that attempts to imagine how a spacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the home planet’s resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star’s energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
Maybe make it a dyson fan since the sphere would only work during the daytime. In polar areas that means half a year without any energy production!
Whereas there is always solar wind.
wHaT aBoUt wHen iTs NoT WinDy!!??!?!?
Kind of looks like an atom
Is dark matter just Dyson sphered stars?
While the idea is charming, a Dyson sphere itself would still consist of matter and as such it would emit radiation according to its temperature (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_radiation). And since it surrounds a star it is heated from the inside and would definitely emit radiation that can be detected. Dark Matter is missing this radiation part and is only observed by its gravitation.
So the answer is no, unfortunately.
It would definitely emit thermal radiation. if it was 99% efficient and the size of pluto’s orbit, around a start like the sun, and the energy was used to create matter, I think it would radiate 0.009 W/m2 with a peak emission wavelength of 150micrometers. The James Webb telescope has infrared capabilities that max out at 28.5 micrometers so def not detectable.
But probably a dyson sphere would be smaller than pluto’s orbit, which would greatly increase the apparent power, and shorten the wavelength. idk it’s all imaginary.
I won’t subject you to my hand writing but I did (power of sun × 0.01)/(surface area of sphere with Pluto’s orbital radius) to get radiation intensity (0.009 W/m2). Then rearranged Stefan-Boltzmann law to solve for temperature (19.8K). Then used Wien’s Displacement Law to calculate the peak wavelength (1.5×10-4 m).
Maybe I’ll run the numbers again with a martian orbit radius, and 50% efficiency.
My initial reaction: “What? No.”
After thinking a little bit: “hmm I guess you could say that…”
Start with a dyson ring or swarm
Would recommend Orion’s Arm for “theoretical” but fiction takes on structures like this:
https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/5067d430e6021
That article is not comprehensive either, their universe is quite expansive.
Two of my favorites may be “W-brains,” computing structures with very carefully arranged wormhole pairs serving as data buses to overcome the latency of communicating at such scale, and “neural stars,” another take which is a computational structure inside a neutron star sized volume/mass (again, to overcome latency issues).
There are much smaller megastructures too, depending on where in the timeline you are looking.
Is this like the SCP foundation stories but for space opera science fiction?
Or the slightly more achievable version - Ringworld.
We will be lucky to have Dyson vacuums at the end of this century
You might like this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pP44EPBMb8A about how to build one from Earth.
If you think it’s cool, you should try the game :)
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1366540/Dyson_Sphere_Program/
That’s crazy that they made this hypothesis based on a steam game
Some TIL posts really surprise you, it’s crazy to me that you have never heard about this. Not being degrading or anything like that, it’s just surprising.
Yeah never heard about it, although I never watched Star Trek personally.
But did you know that we can extract Graphene by heating it up super high so that everything else gets destroyed except graphene?
Read the bobiverse and you’ll come across a topopolis. The pictures on wiki suck so here’s one from fiction.
I didn’t know that! You keep sharing the hits! Keep it coming!
I don’t think it’s surprising at all that you’ve never heard of a Dyson sphere. It’s not a very popular idea even in science fiction.
Eh, there’s only one in all of Star Trek, and they forgot about it after one episode. Should have a whole series.
There was a star trek novel dealing with it. I read it but don’t remember any details. My favorite along those lines was the ringworld books.
One of today’s lucky 100000
That’s definitely one of Randall’s more wholesome ones. By the way, this is one of my favourite book quotes on that subject:
The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T.H. White, The Once and Future King
There is also the Matrioshka brain, a hypothetical supercomputer powered by a Dyson sphere
Ok this one’s new to me!
I don’t remember the math, but you lose return on investment after a certain percentage of coverage.
Dyson Grids are the future!!! 😜
The other “benefit” to the sphere is blacking out a star. Other life, should it exist, is less likely to find the structure.
Wouldn’t we cook in the end if you don’t let out residual em?
Ouh! Love me some “Dark Forest hypothesis” existential dread 😁
I would think it’d make it more likely that you’re discovered when you turn your star into a black ball with a gigantic IR signature where a star should be. Any civilization with a cursory understanding of gravity and stellar spectra would turn every telescope they have on you.
What does IR red shift into over cosmic distances? But it would be just as, if not less, noticeable as a star suddenly dimming to [100%-optimal capture rate]
Deeper IR, microwave and radio. Within a galaxy, redshift can be ignored. In another galaxy, the issue is moot, you don’t need to worry about them and they don’t need to worry about you.
Our current scopes can pick up brown dwarfs with a surface temperature below freezing. An object the diameter of a planetary orbit, with the gravitational effect of a main sequence star and giving off just black body radiation is gonna stick out like a neon “Interesting stuff here!” sign the moment someone does a long wavelength survey of your general region.
Even if you build a swarm instead of a solid shell, you’re still going to shift the star’s apparent spectrum towards IR, from the swarm radiating waste heat. A star whose mass, diameter and emission spectrum don’t match up with the math is inviting investigation, regardless of how you try to mask what you’ve been doing.
The gravity from the star will also still be there regardless of how much of its EM signature is visible outside of the sphere.
Or DYson Bubbles, which would also “cover” enough “surface” to be viable without needing god knows how many planets’ worth of material
I like the idea of a dyson swarm
It would probably be configured using YAML and require health checks and quorum monitoring. I’m not sure I would want that job, especially on-call shifts. The consequences of downtime would be on a whole other level.
Okay but where does the invisible hand dryer go?
Any civilization that needs that much energy would have long ago exhausted their planet’s resources and gone extinct.
Came here to say that if you like this concept, Peter Hamilton has a book series called Commonwealth Saga in the science fiction category that is excellent. Lots of pseudoscience from early 2000s in that series.
