Dyson Spheres
Abstract
I review the origins and development of the idea of Dyson spheres, their purpose, their engineering, and their detectability. I explicate the ways in which the popular imagining of them as monolithic objects would make them dynamically unstable under gravity and radiation pressure, and mechanically unstable to buckling. I develop a model for the radiative coupling between a star and large amounts of material orbiting it, and connect the observational features of a star plus Dyson sphere system to the gross radiative properties of the sphere itself. I discuss the still-unexplored problem of the effects of radiative feedback on the central star's structure and luminosity. Finally, I discuss the optimal sizes of Dyson spheres under various assumptions about their purpose as sources of low-entropy emission, dissipative work, or computation.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.16734,
title = {Dyson Spheres},
author = {Jason T. Wright},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.16734},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Invited review. 21pp, 1 figure. v.3 contains a correction to the definition of s and to the units of Eq. 23