In the classic 1937 sci-fi novel "Star Maker," author Olaf Stapledon imagined a massive machine that could encompass an entire star, capturing its energy and harnessing it to provide near unlimited energy to space-faring civilizations. More than two decades later, Stapledon's creative thought experiment became a legitimate scientific concept when physicist Freeman Dyson published a 1960 paper in the journal Science. Dyson argued that, logically speaking, any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial civilization would develop such intense energy needs that they would need megastructures like those envisioned by Stapledon.
Thus the concept of Dyson spheres was born, but they've remained theoretical — until perhaps recently. A study last month in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society using observations from star-observing programs Gaia , 2MASS and WISE suggests that Dyson spheres may exist around at least seven different stars.
