JWST Finds Two Dyson-Sphere Candidates Were Just Galaxies Aligned Behind Stars
Astronomers used the James Webb Space Telescope to test two strong Dyson-sphere candidates by hunting for the telltale mid-infrared waste heat that would accompany a megastructure around a star. After sifting through about five million Milky Way stars and confirming the most promising cases, JWST revealed that both candidates were actually distant galaxies almost perfectly aligned behind foreground stars, producing the infrared excess. One is a hot dust-obscured galaxy; the other a dusty starburst. While the false positives rule out these two Dyson-sphere interpretations, they refine search methods and lay groundwork for future telescopes with adaptive optics to separate stars from background galaxies.