CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — In a closed workshop this past November, a small group of the world’s top astrophysicists gathered at MIT to wrestle with a question that sounds like science fiction but has a very concrete scientific answer: How would we detect a Dyson sphere? The meeting, held November 15–16, 2024, wasn’t about just any Dyson sphere. The researchers focused on a specific, and arguably more plausible, variant — megastructures built around black holes rather than stars.
Think of it like this: a star gives off a steady, predictable glow, making it a reliable energy source. A black hole, with its swirling accretion disk of superheated matter, is more like a roaring furnace.
An advanced civilization might want to tap into that furnace, and the waste heat from such a structure would be a telltale signature. That signature is infrared radiation, and the hunt for it has a history dating back to the man who gave these hypothetical structures their name.
In 1960, physicist Freeman Dyson published a paper in Science titled “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation.” He proposed that a sufficiently advanced civilization could build a shell or swarm of collectors around its home star to capture most of its energy, and the inevitable heat leakage would be visible in the infrared spectrum.
Old searches, new telescopes
Modern astronomers have already combed through data from two major NASA missions. The Kepler Space Telescope, which operated from 2009 to 2018, and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which ran from 2009 to 2011 before being reactivated in 2013, both looked for anomalous infrared signals. Neither turned up a clear Dyson sphere candidate.
But the new workshop argued that earlier searches might have been looking in the wrong places. The real action, the thinking goes, could be around stellar-mass black holes — dense collapsed stars that pull in gas and dust, creating accretion disks that glow in X-rays and infrared.
A megastructure orbiting such a black hole could be even more energy-dense than one around a star, and its waste heat should be detectable with the right instruments.
Two next-generation space telescopes
The workshop’s focus was on the two most powerful infrared observatories humanity has ever built — or will soon have. The James Webb Space Telescope, launched in 2021 and fully operational since 2022, is already in space and scanning the cosmos. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, planned for launch in 2027, will have a wide field of view that makes it ideal for survey work.
Both can detect the faint infrared excess that would signal an engineered structure. The meeting included two prominent figures in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Dr. Avi Loeb, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at Harvard University, has been a vocal advocate for expanding the search beyond traditional radio signals. Dr. Jason Wright, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University, has led some of the most rigorous analyses of infrared survey data for artificial signatures. Together, the workshop produced a preprint paper that lays out a strategic survey plan.
The idea: look at the accretion disks around stellar-mass black holes for anomalous infrared excess — a spike in heat that cannot be explained by natural processes. It’s the astronomical equivalent of seeing a glowing campfire in the dark and realizing the heat pattern doesn’t match any known type of wood.
No funding yet, but a plan
The practical upshot is that no new funding commitments were announced at the meeting. What did emerge was a clear path forward: the group plans to submit a formal proposal to the NASA Exoplanet Exploration Program. If approved, that would mean dedicated telescope time — likely on Roman during its planned mission, and maybe on Webb — to systematically check candidate black holes for a Dyson sphere signal.
For ordinary readers, here’s what it means: we are getting to the point where a discovery of extraterrestrial engineering is no longer a theoretical “what if” but an actual experimental search. The telescopes exist, the targets are mapped, and the strategy is written down.
We may not find anything — or we could find something that changes everything. For now, the astrophysicists involved are keeping their expectations measured. They are not claiming to have detected anything.
They are simply saying: let’s look. And they have a solid plan for how to do it.
Sources
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