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Technology-savvy aliens could be powering their society using a hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson sphere to harvest energy from a black hole. And the sphere might radiate in peculiar ways, allowing telescopes on Earth to discover the existence of intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, a new study suggests.
A Dyson sphere is a speculative structure that would encircle a star with a tight formation of orbiting platforms in order to capture starlight and produce power. First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, the idea might be realized by a spacefaring extraterrestrial species who had spread out across their star system and therefore required ever-increasing amounts of energy. Dyson's answer is the Dyson sphere, or "a hollow ball built around the sun would solve the space and energy problems," according to his paper. Therefore, it's a theoretical device that sits around an entire star and harvests its energy. Its goal is to help power a civilization whose energy demands have simply eclipsed their planet's natural potential. It's part of Dyson's broader suggestion that the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) should set their sights on the kind of energy signature that such an item could discharge.
Another civilization, with even higher energy demands than what we've outlined above, might decide to deploy a Dyson sphere around a black hole, which is where these researchers began their work. Their goal is to explore the power needs of a civilization making the jump from a type 2 to a type 3 civilization, which could be Earth in as little as 1,000 years, according to their scientific napkin math. But is it at all feasible to use a black hole as you'd harness the energy of the sun or another star?
"In this paper, we consider and discuss six types of energy sources: the CMB, the Hawking radiation, an accretion disk, Bondi accretion, a corona, and the relativistic jets from two types of black holes: a non-rotating black hole and a rotating black hole," the researchers explain. This method, they say, is more intensive than previous attempts to study black hole energy-harvesting, which have only explored the accretion disk (the structure of a black hole that you typically picture) or the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the electromagnetic radiation that remains from the earliest stages of the universe.
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