Related papers: Making Habitable Worlds: Planets Versus Megastruct…
Apart from thousands of `regular' exoplanet candidates, Kepler satellite has discovered a few stars exhibiting peculiar eclipse-like events. They are most probably caused by disintegrating bodies transiting in front of the star. However,…
In this paper we revisit the Dysonian approach and assume that a superadvanced civilisation is capable of building a cosmic megastructure located closer than the habitable zone (HZ). Then such a Dyson Sphere (DS) might be visible in the…
The discovery of a biosphere on another planet would transform how we view ourselves, and our planet Earth, in relation to the rest of the cosmos. We now know Earth is one planet among eight circling our sun; our sun is part of a swirling…
Arnold (2005), Forgan (2013), and Korpela et al. (2015) noted that planet-sized artificial structures could be discovered with Kepler as they transit their host star. We present a general discussion of transiting megastructures, and…
With more than 260 extrasolar planetary systems discovered to-date, the search for habitable planets has found new grounds. Unlike our solar system, the stars of many of these planets are hosts to eccentric or close-in giant bodies. Several…
Soon after the release of the WISE all-sky catalogue of 500 million mid-infrared (IR) objects, suggestions were made that it could be used to search for extrasolar devices constructed by an advanced civilization to convert a significant…
We propose that the two newly detected Earth-size planets around the hot B subdwarf star KIC 05807616 are remnant of the tidally destructed metallic core of a massive planet. A single massive gas-giant planet was spiralling-in inside the…
The Kepler-field star KIC 8462852, an otherwise apparently ordinary F3 main-sequence star, showed several highly unusual dimming events of variable depth and duration. Adding to the mystery was the discovery that KIC 8462852 faded by 14%…
First conceptualised in Olaf Stapledon's 1937 novel 'Star Maker', before being popularised by Freeman Dyson in the 1960s, Dyson Spheres are structures which surround a civilisation's sun to collect all the energy it radiates. Through…
Whereas the Solar System has Mars and Europa as the best candidates for finding fossil/extant life as we know it - based on complex carbon compounds and liquid water - the 263 (non-pulsar) planetary systems around other stars as known at 15…
The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfils an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants…
High-contrast near-infrared imaging of the nearby star HR 8799 has shown three giant planets. Such images were possible due to the wide orbits (> 25 AU) and youth (< 100 Myr) of the imaged planets, which are still hot and bright as they…
Understanding the formation and dynamical evolution of habitable planets in extrasolar planetary systems is a challenging task. In this respect, systems with multiple giant planets and/or multiple stars present special complications. The…
In recent years a paradigm shift has occurred in exoplanet science, wherein low-mass stars are increasingly viewed as a foundational pillar of the search for potentially habitable worlds in the solar neighborhood. However, the formation…
The presence of dark energy in our universe is causing space to expand at an accelerating rate. As a result, over the next approximately 100 billion years, all stars residing beyond the Local Group will fall beyond the cosmic horizon and…
To explore the hypothesis that KIC 8462852's aperiodic dimming is caused by artificial megastructures in orbit (Wright et al. 2015), rather than a natural cause such as cometary fragments in a highly elliptical orbit (Marengo et al. 2015),…
The ancestor philosophers' dream of thousands of new worlds is finally realised: about 3500 extrasolar planets have been discovered in the neighborhood of our Sun. Most of them are very different from those we used to know in our Solar…
The star KIC 8462852 shows a very unusual and hard to comprehend light curve. The dip d7922 absorbs 16% of the starlight. The light curve is unusually smooth but the very steep edges make it hard to find a simple natural explanation by…
The article discusses the possibility of a Type-III extraterrestrial civilization constructing megastructures around a galaxy in regions where the galactic radiation becomes indistinguishable from the CMB radiation. For a Milky Way-like…
There has been remarkable progress recently in both observational and theoretical studies of galaxy formation and evolution. Largely due to a combination of deep Hubble Space Telescope imaging, Keck spectroscopy, and COBE far-IR background…