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We must completely change the way we build homes to stay below 2°C
We must completely change the way we build homes to stay below 2°C
Sooner-than-expected climate impacts could cost the world trillions
Sooner-than-expected climate impacts could cost the world trillions
#778: Dyson Swarms
Freeman Dyson asked a fascinating question. What would it look like if a civilization was using all the energy coming from their star? And what form would this take? This introduced the concept of a Dyson Sphere, or more realistically, a Dyson Swarm surrounding a star. But if you’re skeptical about the concept, you’re in good company.
Show Notes- What a Dyson swarm is (and why a solid Dyson sphere won’t work)
- Freeman Dyson’s original idea and its scientific motivation
- Why energy demand grows exponentially with technology and AI
- Capturing stellar energy as the ultimate power source
- Orbital mechanics and long-term stability of satellite swarms
- Heat generation and waste heat as a major engineering challenge
- Beaming energy to planets: efficiency, risks, and limitations
- Orbital congestion and traffic in large satellite systems
- Optimal placement of a Dyson swarm in a solar system
- Could Earth exist inside or alongside a Dyson swarm?
- Using swarms for energy, climate engineering, and computation
- Searching for Dyson swarms via infrared “waste heat” signatures
- Tabby’s Star and why it wasn’t evidence of a megastructure
- Dust clouds vs technosignatures: how astronomers tell the difference
- Dyson swarms as part of SETI and technosignature research
- Why searching for alien megastructures is scientifically valid
- What Dyson swarms reveal about the limits of advanced civilizations
Fraser Cain:
AstronomyCast, Episode 778 Dyson Swarms. Welcome to AstronomyCast, our weekly facts-based journey through the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain.
I’m the publisher of Universe Today. With me, as always, is Dr. Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pamela, how you doing?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I am doing well. Following the holidays, it is definitely a three coffee Monday.
Fraser Cain:
No, the forbidden third coffee. No, you do not drink the forbidden third coffee.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It is here. It will be drank during this episode.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Every now and then. For me, two coffee.
One coffee when I get up, one coffee after I’ve done a bunch of important work and deserve reward. Exactly. A third coffee if the second coffee just didn’t do its desired job, or I’m just feeling like I want to continue the habit, the ritual.
But my wife gives me this stern look and she goes, that’s your third coffee, isn’t it? And you’re to and fro from the bathroom. You are having trouble getting to sleep at night.
You are feeling a little jittery. You regret it every single time. And I’m like, shut up and let me drink my coffee.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
There will be no regrets. I refuse to ever regret coffee, except for Turkish coffee. That often leads to regret.
Fraser Cain:
Apparently, the new research, which we can shortly ignore, is that having a mix between coffee and tea actually gives you the greatest health outcome. So now Carla has wisely said, hey, I’ll make you some tea. She drinks tea and fancy tea, oolong this and matcha that.
And so she will go, I’ll make some tea. And so I’ll have a glass, a cup of the tea. And then that hits all the same spots.
So that’s the solution. Instead of dreaded third coffee, up your tea game.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I need easier to clean tea filters.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
That’s a personal problem.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. Yeah. She’s got like a metal one that she puts in her, her teapot.
It works really well. So, um, right. Let’s do our job.
Freeman Dyson asked a fascinating question. What would it look like if a civilization was using all the energy coming from the star and what form would this take? This introduced the concept of a Dyson sphere or more realistically, a Dyson swarm surrounding a star.
But if you’re skeptical about the concept, you’re in good company. Okay. So I want to get this out of the way before we continue this entire conversation, which is that Angela Collier, who is a wonderful science communicator and YouTuber recently posted a video, uh, proposing that the whole idea of a Dyson swarm, Dyson sphere by Freeman Dyson was like a joke.
He was trolling people who were thinking about the idea of radio surveys as a way to search for, uh, extraterrestrial intelligences and saying like, if you think you could do a radio survey, why don’t you do an infrared survey? All these ideas are dumb. You’re all idiots, but you know, I’m going to write a four page paper and lampooning you and done, uh, fine maybe.
Uh, but there has been a legacy to this idea that has persisted and grown to this day. So, uh, so yes, we’ve watched the video. I have, I don’t know if you have, but I’ve watched the video.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And then I went on to, to watch some actual interviews with Dyson and Dyson does not refer to it as being satire or anything like that. He did consider it as an aside to his actual research, just a fun little thing he did. And I mean, we’ve all done ludicrous calculations to see what the result was.
I figured out human beings spaghettified will be 70 light years long because I could. Yeah. Yeah.
So these kinds of things are within our capacity. And he asked the question, what would happen if we surrounded a star with solar panels and right. And it was an aside.
It was not just primary research. It was one of these things where he was very chagrined. You could tell in the interview, um, that this became the thing he was known for, but that’s not the same thing as doing satirical research.
People do do satirical research. This is not it.
Fraser Cain:
Yes. And so, so I think this elicits an emotional response in people. And I, you know, we should definitely unpack this at some point later on in the end, but I, I think it’s, it’s important as you listen to this episode that you put that part of your brain and just set it aside.
We will address it. I promise you by the end. But I, but, but I think what’s important is the, to, to take this question and just kind of go like, we’re using more energy.
What happens if we use more energy forever? What are the limits of that drive for us to use more energy? What does that look like?
And you sort of reach a sort of a, a logical sort of end state. And then you say, could we see that? And then that gives you some interesting answers that, that legitimate astronomers have been puzzling to this day.
So let’s kind of go back and, and sort of look at the original paper. What was the idea or what was the question that Dyson was investigating?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It was basically a, what are the full consequences of surrounding a star with solar panels? That, that was the core idea. And, and is this a way to, to solve power issues?
What will this look like from the outside? And it’s the, what will it look like from the outside, which is where things to me get particularly interesting because there’s, there’s no there, there’s no getting rid of heat readily in space. And this is one of those things that everyone who’s like put data centers in space seems to be ignoring.
Fraser Cain:
We obey all the laws of thermodynamics in this house.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
So, so the, the problem ends up being you, you have a system where you’re heating up, you’re heating up, you’re heating up. It takes a vast quantity of material to build it. And for what purpose?
And then you also end up with gravitational instabilities and stuff like that.
Fraser Cain:
Yep. Yes. So, so this idea, like we know that humanity’s use of energy has been growing at an exponential rate since humanity first arrived on the scene.
Yeah. And that, that, that rate can be, you know, it is a smooth exponential curve and it has grown and grown and grown. And now we use, I don’t know how many petawatts of power, the ludicrous amount of energy right now across the entire planet.
And yet that growth continues and people always say, oh, well, we will stop wanting to grow our use of power. Well, surprise, surprise. Now we have AI data centers.
Now suddenly energy is even more required than it ever was. Like we’ve came up with new reasons to be able to use it. So, so I think that, that you can, that you can say, maybe we’ll want more energy in the future is a, is a logically sound proposition to make.
Yes. And that you can then say, what if we wanted all of it that was available to us? What, what is the maximum amount of energy that we could harvest from our local environment?
And as you said, Dyson said, what if you tried to extract all the energy from your star?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and the, the idea that we’re all used to the idea that’s been popularized so much in science fiction, Star Trek, has one of my favorite examples is, is the solid Dyson sphere. And, and it turns out Dyson spheres are highly unstable. The star does a little bit of, of coughing up CMEs and your sphere’s just going to wibble wobble and it’s not great.
Fraser Cain:
Well, the, the problem is that when you put something in orbit, then that thing is, is able to maintain a sort of balanced state around the object that you were orbiting. If you try to make a rigid sphere, you are no longer in orbit. Your equator might be in orbit.
You’re just gravitationally held there. Yeah. The poles are no longer in orbit.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And so this thing now is no longer sort of held in this, this equilibrium and just will start to drift around or the star will drift around inside of it and will crash into the side of the Dyson sphere. There is no way to make a rigid Dyson sphere and make it stable. You have to make, as you, as we sort of had put into the title, you have to make a Dyson swarm.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right.
Fraser Cain:
And Dyson knew this immediately. He, he, he sort of, you know, immediately called it Dyson sphere. He was thinking of satellites in orbit around the star.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and Larry Nevin took it in his science fiction in the direction of, well, what about a ring? Yes. And even the ring is not stable.
No, no. So, so you have to have discrete objects in motion forces balanced the centripetal versus gravitational.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Then you can go for billions of years, right? Look at Jupiter.
It’s got moons. They’ve been orbiting for billions of years. That is stable.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
No problem.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Now swarms are, are something that, that is suddenly feeling more and more realistic as we look at the increasing number of communication satellites going around and around our world. Um, and as we look at plans for there, there’s this new satellite company that is literally looking to beam sunlight into nighttime areas of our planet because they can.
Fraser Cain:
Well, I always say that we have already begun to build our Dyson swarm. Yes. So look at, look at James Webb.
Yes. Right. James Webb is orbiting the sun.
It’s orbiting in a very specific orbit, but it’s essentially orbiting the sun. It’s not really orbiting the earth. Yeah.
It is collecting solar power from the sun that would have made it off into space. And it’s doing work with it in this case, doing astronomy and computation, right? All of the other satellites that we have put into space that are orbiting the sun.
They are part of our Dyson swarm. We have already begun the construction of our Dyson swarm. Now it is pathetic, but you can imagine this smooth growth over time.
As we launch more satellites, they do more work. They, we come up with uses for them. They continue to harvest energy for the sun that it will never feel like, you know, now we will begin the construction of our Dyson swarm.
It’ll just be, Hey, look, we ran out of energy that we could harvest from the sun.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And I mean, the other side of that is like, if you look at the geostationary orbits, they have very well-defined, you put them here, they have this spacing. We are filling up the spacing. We are making the spacing smaller.
Um, things are never fully stable in geostationary because the moon has gravity and that therefore it likes to yank things around. And, and so there’s a lot of work that goes into trying to keep things in a nice, neat grid. And, and so this starts to put you in the situation of, well, that’s just one band around the equator that we’re already starting to fill and it’s already unstable.
Now, what are the consequences? And, and I think we should look at two different cases. One is the case of let’s surround the sun.
And then the other is let’s surround the earth with steerable satellites that can collect light and beam it to the surface of the planet, which is something that people are talking about doing.
Fraser Cain:
All right, well, let’s start with your, I want to start with your second idea first, because it seems like a, like a smaller, more feasible idea.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right. So, so there are two different problems that folks are looking to solve with a Dyson swarm light around the planet earth. And one is by sticking enough satellites around our planet, um, by which I mean far more than what Starlink will ever accomplish.
You start to do a significant dimming of the amount of sunlight reaching the planet earth. And because of that, you can potentially offset climate change by changing sunlight incident on the planet. Don’t do this.
We don’t understand the science well enough. That’s just the path to chaos.
Fraser Cain:
Right. But so, so, I mean, you’re specifically talking about a geoengineering concept where you are attempting to block sunlight falling on the earth, uh, as a way to combat climate change, not as a solution to our ever growing need for energy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s a twofold solution. So on one hand, big old solar panels, you can’t see how much I’m holding my arms out, big old solar panels that are collecting light can electing energy and blocking that light energy from reaching the surface of the planet. The other side of that is you then solve the energy crisis by doing tight beam, uh, pulsing of that energy to the surface of the planet.
Fraser Cain:
This increasing the heat on the planet.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Well, so, so this is where it starts to get, huh? Because the idea is, and I love the fact that they’re always like wirelessly send the energy to the surface of the planet. It’s just sort of like, all right, we’re going to stress that word of all the things you’re going to stress.
Um, so the idea is sunlight has a whole range of different, uh, temperatures. It’s blackbody radiation. It’s incident across a wide area.
So now instead, we’re going to block out a lot of that light. We’re going to focus it down to a narrow beam. We’re going to send it down to the energy collector that is ready to somehow receive it.
This is like we’re sodium and stuff like that is really good at collecting energy. Um, how we do this as one of those things, it isn’t a solved problem, right?
Fraser Cain:
I mean, isn’t that sort of like putting your farm in a warehouse and then putting grow lights on the top of the roof of your farm and then hoping that you’re going to get that, that, that turned out to be the right, the smart move.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
And, and not a greenhouse, a dark warehouse, solar panels on top, grow lights on the other side. Now you’re down to whatever is the efficiency of the grow lights. You are throwing away usable energy.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And that energy that’s getting transported through our atmosphere has a number of different issues going for it. Uh, one of those issues is you don’t want to fly a plane through it. So now you’re having to keep track of all of these beams of light coming down from the sky to the surface of the planet.
Um, your satellites, you’re not going to have them in geostationary orbit. So you’re going to have to be essentially doing bursts of directed energy as, as the energy is sent down to the collection areas. Um, you can’t do continuous blast unless you have like a line of collectors around the planet.
Uh, that’s going to be hot. It’s going to be when you’re putting energy through the atmosphere. I mean, they’re not saying the word laser necessarily, but what they’re describing is narrow beam, columnized light.
It’s going to be hot. So now you’re causing chemical reactions by heating up a, a channel of air through the atmosphere in ways that normally it would only get heated through other things like lightning and stuff.
Fraser Cain:
It’s not going to be as hot as lightning, but the collection systems are going to heat up. The computers are using this electricity for going to heat up. They’re going to release heat.
Uh, like, can we disagree that you get one or the other?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah.
Fraser Cain:
That you either get to darken, you get to reduce the amount of incident light falling on your planet, or you set up collecting systems that are, that are beaming power to the planet. And you maybe get that advantage. You’re going to get additional heat and you’re going to heat the planet up.
You have to kind of choose which one you want.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And it’s also a, a stability issue. When you look at, uh, graphics of what Dyson swarms look like, they’re always a sphere of equally spaced satellites. But the problem is that to stay in orbit, you have to be going around and around the world and the entire swarm can’t be moving in lock step, like a solid object.
And so you’re going to have to have them at different altitudes. You’re going to have to have them at different angles. And suddenly it starts to become a nightmare of traffic congestion.
And you now have things that different altitudes that are beaming energy and potentially not just going to blast airplanes, good are going to blast each other.
Fraser Cain:
Right. All right. So, you know, we are skeptical.
Yes. Okay. Um, I want to move on to the actual, the Dyson swarm is as thought through by, by Dyson.
So, so where do you get the stuff to make a swarm that could completely surround your star?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
You take apart the entire solar system.
Fraser Cain:
Right.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and admittedly, if you’re doing a low key, very open swarm, you need less material. So maybe you get to leave behind the planet earth, but what they’ve figured out, there’s some really cool computations and there’s an excellent article in universe today, um, where, if you put one of these too close to the sun, there’s just no thermodynamics controlling it. If you put it further out, that energy then has to pass over the planet earth.
And so what they’re talking about is if you put one out at like Mars, like distances, that’s a good distance for it to work, but then you’re going to raise the temperature of the planet earth, 140 degrees Kelvin or Celsius, pick which one you want. 140 degrees is a lot people. It’s a lot.
Fraser Cain:
Yeah. The, if I remember this article, you had to go to past Uranus where the increase in temperature was only say four or five degrees. And, and like, you’re not, you’re not gonna have enough material to make a sphere that that’s, that’s that big.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Right.
Fraser Cain:
So earth has got to go into the wood chip or two, right? Like if you want to properly build your Dyson swarm and you want temperatures to be habitable, the temperatures have to be habitable on the satellites themselves. Right.
There are, there are no planets anymore. You are, uh, you’re doing that. Now you can come up with a, with a way that maybe the earth is orbiting just outside the Dyson swarm that the, that the orbits are overlapping in a way that leaves a gap open for planet earth as earth is rotating.
Like I’m sure some future, uh, solar system engineer can come up with a architecture that allows you to have a planet still get that sunlight while you have the, you’ve dismantled everything else and you just have the rest of the Dyson swarm for, you know, because you’re, you’re nostalgic about the planet that you grew up.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
It’s an easy way to have the correct amount of gravity.
Fraser Cain:
Right. Yeah. Sure.
But I, you know, at this point you’ve got probably rotating space stations that are thousands of kilometers across, right? Like you’ve, you’ve got a, you’ve come up with you, you’ve dismantled your, your planet. Um, so how much energy, like, like, what do you get out of this?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
If you go and dismantle your solar system, I mean, you can nominally capture 100% of the energy coming off of the sun. So the total energy coming off the sun is 10 to the 33 ergs, which admittedly is a stupid astronomical unit. Uh, normal people speak in Watts.
So this is 10 to the 26 Watts of energy.
Fraser Cain:
That’s a lot of zeros.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yeah. So, so I don’t think there’s enough light bulbs that have ever been created to take advantage of that. No, I now want to do the calculation of if you made a light bulb every second since the beginning of the universe, do you get there?
Probably, probably. But, uh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fraser Cain:
It’s a lot of energy. And you know, people always go like, no, one’s going to need to use that much energy. And, and my response is humanity says, hold my beer that, that we will invent reasons to use all of that energy ideas that we cannot even fathom or imagine today solar system around.
Yeah. You may want to move the solar system. You may want to park it into a better orbit.
There’s all kinds of things in computation, uh, running ancestor simulations, solving scientific problems. Who knows being able to turning energy into matter in useful functions, running a simulation of the entire universe, including all of the human beings in it. Yeah.
Yeah. So we have no idea what they will use it, but I think it’s, I think again, it is a reasonable assumption to make to say, I don’t know what they’re going to use it for, but they’ll figure out a reason. And so now we’re just going to try and calculate this thing.
And so, as you mentioned, downside is you probably don’t get to have planets anymore. Then you’re going to either super cook anything that is inside the orbit. And so you’re going to have to, and you need the raw material.
You are going to lose your solar system. The benefit you get is this Dyson swarm. So then I think the question is, and I think what Dyson was getting at is, was, could we see this happen?
Could we see them out there in the universe? What would they look like and why?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And this is where you take metal, you heat it up. It re radiates in infrared. And so if you start looking for systems that are giving off vast amounts of energy in the infrared, um, because you’ve taken the energy that’s coming through the surface of a star, spread it out over a significantly large surface area.
Um, and then the other side is just like a swarm may not be having to re-radiate the entire energy of a star in one way or another, but it’s still going to heat up. Data centers are still going to heat up. Things that use power are always going to have heat waste.
That’s just one of the unfortunate realities of, of thermodynamics. There’s heat waste. And so when we go looking at stars, we go looking for thermodynamic excess in the infrared.
And there was an interesting case, Tabby’s star, uh, where they were seeing really weird dips in the light curve. It was behaving in weird ways. There was this brief moment in time where we had to ask the question, is this a Dyson sphere under construction?
And the answer was no, no, it’s not. Yeah, it’s dust. And we could tell because the, the thermal excess didn’t match what you would expect from a advanced civilization engineering its solar system.
Fraser Cain:
Sure. But isn’t like just a cloud of dust around a star, just a kind of Dyson swarm, just an unintentional Dyson swarm?
Dr. Pamela Gay:
I, it’s going to have less of a cliff on, on its, uh, infrared radiation. Um, right. So, yeah.
Fraser Cain:
So this is an example of one that people are like, Oh, maybe it’s an alien megastructure. Uh, but there have been others. Uh, there was, uh, some research that was done within the last two years or so where someone had, had noticed some candidates, potential, uh, you know, objects that fit this criteria, where it’s a compact object that is giving off, that is located within the Milky Way that is giving off an excess of infrared radiation and, and not other wavelengths.
And then the plausible explanations. In fact, they’re not within the, the Milky Way. They are actually galaxies that are far away that are producing an excess of infrared because they have a supermassive black hole at the heart of them.
And it’s really hard to tell what is in the Milky Way and what is one of these galaxies and they’ve all lined up. And so you can sort of easily explain the way, but people have gone looking for and doing surveys of the universe to look for these Dyson swarms.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
The WISE dataset was, was looked through to see what could be found. I’m sure the Roman dataset is going to be looked through.
Fraser Cain:
Yes.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Um, I don’t know if Euclid goes far enough into the infrared to allow it. That’s, that’s, I think so too. So Euclid’s already starting to do data releases.
Um, this is one of those things where there’s lots of different ways that people are asking, are there civilizations out there? And, and this is one of the straightforward techno signature ways to go looking.
Fraser Cain:
And so I think I want to bring this back, which is that sort of that idea that we talked about early on, that you’re feeling kind of skeptical about this thing. And, and my position is always that this is a thought experiment.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Yes.
Fraser Cain:
That, that you’re asking yourself, what if you take, what if you continue on this growth curve? What if you do this? Does this create a signal?
Does this give us a way to search for life in the universe? And it does. It says that if, if civilizations proceed upon this course, then they’re going to create these objects.
They’re going to have infrared signature. And we’re already searching the universe for infrared signatures. So why not take a moment, look through your data, see if there is some unusual infrared objects.
If there are, maybe you’re going to discover something new, which people already have like Boyajian star, um, or these weird red galaxies.
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And, and this is also one of those things where even if the idea of a Dyson swarm spelled out in terms of a, a mesh network of satellites, all at a given distance from their star working as a single entity, I mean, it, it doesn’t have to be something like that. As I already said, something like that starts to become a traffic nightmare. But if instead you imagine a solar system where you have massive stations around it, I just finished, uh, rereading, uh, the children of time and then the sequel books, which, uh, include a solar system where one of the planets gets murdered for lack of a better way to describe what happens to the planet.
And the entities I’m trying desperately not to spoil the book. The entities all end up living in spacecraft. And so now you have a solar system that is swarming with spacecraft.
They’re trying to be the, the thing that keeps the civilization going. And, and so now you don’t have a swarm, but you do have that excess of spacecraft that have excessive infrared radiation again.
Fraser Cain:
Yes, you don’t have to go full Dyson swarm, you can go partial, you can just build an excess of spacecraft and that will start transitioning the star from purely the spectrum that you would normally expect to see into something that is showing off an excess in infrared radiation and is something that is detectable and something is within reach and so I think if you hold in your mind the opinion that answering the question about whether or not we are alone in the universe is one of the most important questions that humanity can ask has ever asked and you would like to know the answer to that question if I gave you an envelope and in that envelope was the answer to the question and you would you with questions are you curious would you open the envelope would you look inside would you find out what the answer is then we should always be looking for ways to conduct that search ways that may seem like crazy science fiction but they are possible and they are feasible and we might as well just look
Dr. Pamela Gay:
And and this is one of those amazing cases where the same data that’s needed to go looking for potential infrared excesses around stars will also do amazing science so there’s no downside to this one collect the survey data allow us to do the research for all the different things that can answer from are there Dyson spheres to are those red galaxies at the beginning of the universe a dust or are they red and dead yeah let’s check all of it out
Fraser Cain:
Yeah and I think it’s the same conversation where people like we shouldn’t be looking for life on Mars right like why not well it wouldn’t be cool if we did like let’s not come up with the wrong answer to whether or not there’s life on Mars let’s come up with the right answer and the right answer requires discipline and caution and care and take multiple steps and you need to make sure you do every piece of it correctly so that you can get a scientific consensus agreeing that each step has been done properly let’s do the same thing with all of these other deep questions to try to get good answers and that is the way we progress as a civilization and that is what I hope with this as well there’s a there’s a you know there are have been about like 40 ideas proposed for how we could search for alien civilizations you know looking for the effects of nuclear war looking for the effects of of you know them sending messages in our direction them communicating with each other them building megastructures that are blocking the light of the star them visiting us them setting up factories in the solution because a million others there are dozens of ideas that each one could be its own research project and I think a lot of them are kind of interesting exciting and have other possible things that we should search for so you know are we absolutely destined to become a civilization that has a Dyson’s were no of course not right is it the only way that civilization to progress of course not but it is something we could look for and it would be a fascinating interesting we actually did find it and kind of terrifying
Dr. Pamela Gay:
Oh yes oh yes and and this is this is the science of today where we could discover any of this in our lifetime or not yeah and that’s that’s why we keep looking as we don’t know what we will or won’t find tomorrow
Fraser Cain:
yeah yeah all right thanks Pamela
Dr. Pamela Gay:
thank you Fraser and thank you to everyone out there on patreon who has supported us this week we would like to thank the following $10 a month and up patrons Alan Gross, Alexis, Andrew Stevenson, Arctic Fox, Astro sets, bebop apocalypse, Benjamin Mueller, Bob Crail, Brett Mormon, Brian Cook, Burry Gowan, Christian Bergholt, Conrad hailing, Daniel loosely, David Bogarty, David Rossetter, dr. whoa, Dwight ilk, Iran Zegrev , Fairchild, flower guy, Frodo Tannenbaum, Jeff McDonald, Glenn McDavid, Greg Davis, Hal McKinney, J Alex Anderson, Janelle Jean Baptiste, to Martin a Jeremy Kerr well Jim of Everett Joe McTee John Herman Jonathan H Staver JP Sullivan Kate Sindretta Keith Murray Kimberly rake lab rat Matt Lee Harbourn Lana Spencer Mark Schindler Matt Rucker Matthias Hayden Michael Purcell that’s Stella digging Stella Alanis Spencer Mark Schneidler Matt Rucker Matthias Hayden Michael Purcell Michelle Cullen Nala Noah Albertson Paul D Disney Pauline middle link Philip Walker red bar is watching RJ Basque Robert Hindle Ruben McCarthy Sergio sin several Sam Brooks and his mom scone Sean Matt Shabhana Steve Rutley Taz Tali the brain Tiffany Rogers Travis see Porco van Ruckman will field and Zach who Kendall thank you so very much all right thanks everyone and we’ll
Fraser Cain:
see you next week goodbye everyone
Live ShowSolar and Lunar Eclipses in 2026
This year offers an interesting mix of celestial coverups: a total solar eclipse viewable from Spain and two deep lunar
eclipses (one total, one not quite) visible across North America. The fourth, an annular solar eclipse, will be confined to the bottom of the world.
The post Solar and Lunar Eclipses in 2026 appeared first on Sky & Telescope.
The Surprising Heat of Early Clusters
Astronomers using ALMA have detected the earliest hot galaxy cluster atmosphere ever observed, revealing a massive reservoir of superheated gas in the infant cluster SPT2349-56 just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The gas is far hotter and more pressurised than current theories predicted for such a young system, forcing scientists to completely rethink how galaxy clusters evolved in the early universe. This discovery suggests that violent processes like supermassive black hole outbursts and intense starbursts heated these cluster atmospheres much earlier and more efficiently than anyone expected, fundamentally challenging our understanding of how the universe’s largest structures formed.
How Black Holes Slowly Starve Galaxies
Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope and ALMA have discovered one of the oldest ‘dead’ galaxies in the universe, revealing that supermassive black holes can kill galaxies through slow starvation rather than violent destruction. The galaxy, nicknamed ‘Pablo’s Galaxy’, formed most of its 200 billion solar masses of stars between 12.5 and 11.5 billion years ago before abruptly stopping, not because its black hole blew away all the gas in one catastrophic event, but because it repeatedly heated incoming material over multiple cycles, preventing fresh fuel from ever replenishing the galaxy’s star forming reserves.
La NASA transmitirá en directo el regreso y el amerizaje de Crew 11
Read this press release in English here.
La NASA y SpaceX prevén que, si las condiciones meteorológicas lo permiten, el desacoplamiento de la misión SpaceX Crew 11 de la agencia espacial estadounidense de la Estación Espacial Internacional se produzca no antes de las 5:05 p.m. EST (hora del este) del miércoles 14 de enero.
El 8 de enero, la NASA anunció su decisión de traer de vuelta a la Tierra antes de lo previsto a los integrantes de la misión SpaceX Crew 11 de la agencia desde la estación espacial, mientras los equipos técnicos siguen de cerca un problema médico que afecta a un miembro de la tripulación que actualmente vive y trabaja a bordo del laboratorio orbital. Debido a la confidencialidad médica, no es apropiado que la NASA comparta más detalles sobre el miembro de la tripulación, quien se encuentra estable.
Está planeado que los astronautas de la NASA Zena Cardman y Mike Fincke, el astronauta de JAXA (Agencia Japonesa de Exploración Aeroespacial) Kimiya Yui y el cosmonauta de Roscosmos Oleg Platonov americen frente a la costa de California a las 3:41 a.m. del jueves 15 de enero.
Los responsables de la misión continúan supervisando las condiciones en la zona de recuperación, ya que el desacoplamiento de la nave Dragon de SpaceX depende de las condiciones operativas de la nave espacial, la preparación del equipo de recuperación, las condiciones meteorológicas, el estado del mar y otros factores. La NASA y SpaceX seleccionarán una hora y un lugar concretos para el amerizaje cuando se acerque la fecha del desacoplamiento de la nave espacial de Crew 11.
La cobertura en directo (en inglés) de la NASA del regreso y las actividades relacionadas se retransmitirá en NASA+, Amazon Prime, y el canal de YouTube de la agencia. Aprenda cómo transmitir contenido de la NASA a través de diversas plataformas en línea, incluidas las redes sociales.
La cobertura de la NASA es la siguiente (todas las horas son del este y están sujetas a cambios en función de las operaciones en tiempo real):
Miércoles, 14 de enero
3 p.m. – Comienza la cobertura del cierre de escotilla en NASA+, Amazon Prime, y YouTube.
3:30 p.m. – Cierre de escotilla
4:45 p.m. – Comienza la cobertura del desacoplamiento en NASA+, Amazon Prime, y YouTube.
5:05 p.m. – Desacoplamiento
Tras la finalización de la cobertura del desacoplamiento, la NASA distribuirá las conversaciones (solo en formato audio) entre la tripulación Crew 11, la estación espacial y los controladores de vuelo durante el tránsito de la nave Dragon alejándose del complejo orbital.
Jueves, 15 de enero
2:15 a.m. – Comienza la cobertura del regreso en NASA+, Amazon Prime, y YouTube.
2:51 a.m. – Encendido de desorbitado
3:41 a.m. – Amerizaje
5:45 a.m. – El administrador de la NASA, Jared Isaacman, liderará una rueda de prensa sobre el regreso a la Tierra que se transmitirá en directo a través de NASA+, Amazon Prime, y el canal de YouTube de la agencia.
Para participar virtualmente en la conferencia de prensa, los medios de comunicación deben ponerse en contacto con la sala de prensa del Centro Espacial Johnson de la NASA para obtener los detalles de la llamada antes de las 5 p.m. CST (hora del centro) del 14 de enero, enviando un correo electrónico a jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov o llamando al +1 281-483-5111. Para hacer preguntas, los medios de comunicación deben llamar al menos 10 minutos antes del inicio de la conferencia. La política de acreditación de medios de comunicación de la agencia está disponible en línea (en inglés).
Encuentre la cobertura completa de la misión, el blog de tripulaciones comerciales de la NASA y más información sobre la misión Crew 11 (todo en inglés) en:
https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew
-fin-
Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell / María José Viñas
Sede central, Washington
+1 202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov / maria-jose.vinasgarcia@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones / Joseph Zakrzewski
Centro Espacial Johnson, Houston
+1 281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / joseph.a.zakrzewski@nasa.gov
Steve Siceloff
Centro Espacial Kennedy, Fla.
+1 321-867-2468
steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov
When Baby Stars Throw Tantrums
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured stunning new image of HH 80/81, a pair of objects created when supersonic jets from a newborn star slam into previously expelled gas clouds, heating them to extreme levels. These jets, powered by a protostar 20 times more massive than our Sun, stretch over 32 light years through space and travel at speeds exceeding 1,000 kilometres per second, making them the fastest outflows ever recorded from a young star.
These small lifestyle tweaks can add a year to your life
These small lifestyle tweaks can add a year to your life
NASA to Provide Live Coverage of Crew-11 Return, Splashdown
Lee este comunicado de prensa en español aquí.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 5:05 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Jan. 14, for the undocking of the agency’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission from the International Space Station, pending weather conditions.
On Jan. 8, NASA announced its decision to return the agency’s SpaceX Crew-11 mission to Earth from the space station earlier than originally planned as teams monitor a medical concern with a crew member currently living and working aboard the orbital laboratory, who is stable. Due to medical privacy, it is not appropriate for NASA to share more details about the crew member.
NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Kimiya Yui, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Platonov are targeted to splash down off the coast of California at 3:41 a.m. on Thursday, Jan. 15.
Mission managers continue monitoring conditions in the recovery area, as undocking of the SpaceX Dragon depends on spacecraft readiness, recovery team readiness, weather, sea states, and other factors. NASA and SpaceX will select a specific splashdown time and location closer to the Crew-11 spacecraft undocking.
NASA’s live coverage of return and related activities will stream on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel. Learn how to stream NASA content through a variety of online platforms, including social media.
NASA’s coverage is as follows (all times Eastern and subject to changed based on real-time operations):
Wednesday, Jan. 14
3 p.m. – Hatch closure coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
3:30 p.m. – Hatch closing
4:45 p.m. – Undocking coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
5:05 p.m. – Undocking
Following the conclusion of undocking coverage, NASA will distribute audio-only communications between Crew-11, the space station, and flight controllers during Dragon’s transit away from the orbital complex.
Thursday, Jan. 15
2:15 a.m. – Return coverage begins on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and YouTube.
2:51 a.m. – Deorbit burn
3:41 a.m. – Splashdown
5:45 a.m. – NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman will lead a Return to Earth news conference streaming live on NASA+, Amazon Prime, and the agency’s YouTube channel.
To participate virtually in the news conference, media must contact the NASA Johnson newsroom for call details by 5 p.m. CST, Jan. 14, at: jsccommu@mail.nasa.gov or 281-483-5111. To ask questions, media must dial in no later than 10 minutes before the start of the call. The agency’s media credentialing policy is available online.
Find full mission coverage, NASA’s commercial crew blog, and more information about the Crew-11 mission at:
https://www.nasa.gov/commercialcrew
-end-
Joshua Finch / Jimi Russell
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-1100
joshua.a.finch@nasa.gov / james.j.russell@nasa.gov
Sandra Jones / Joseph Zakrzewski
Johnson Space Center, Houston
281-483-5111
sandra.p.jones@nasa.gov / joseph.a.zakrzewski@nasa.gov
Steve Siceloff
Kennedy Space Center, Fla.
321-867-2468
steven.p.siceloff@nasa.gov