Is the Cygnus bubble a Dyson sphere?

Picture from the Mount Wilson Observatory


Is the amazing solar system sized bubble in Cygnus discovered by Dave Jurasevich of the Mount Wilson Observatory, a Planetary nebulae or is it a Dyson sphere or a dyson Bubble? In fact it is not a Dyson sphere or a Dyson bubble. Astronomers and physicists can tell the difference. But the bubble inspires speculation. What if it were a Dyson sphere in construction?

From an article in the New Scientist on the dog day of 23rd July: "Giant Soap Bubble Found Floating in Space" It seems far too symmetrical.

There are a number of ways we are supposed to detect extraterrestrial life. One, of course is from radio signals like the "WOW" signal, never to be repeated, emanating from the Chi Sagittarii star group.

But another way was suggested by Dyson's thought experiment: Instead of radio signals look for Dyson spheres, which are artificial mega structures that enclose the orbit of a star, fabricated from the material of that solar system.

Consequentlly, in his article "A program to search for dyson spheres with the infrared space observatory" in Acta Astronautica (1998) C. N. Tilgner suggests that:

"The task to distinguish a Dyson sphere from natural dust components therefore reduces in the first place to the question: does the infrared excess spectrum fit to a single-temperature blackbody radiation or can the spectrum only be fit by a superposition of several blackbody curves with different temperatures? Of course, the accuracy of the fit directly depends on the number of spectral points measured for the target."


The Dyson sphere is the marker of what Kardashev calls a Type 2 civilisation. A Type 1. civilisation is capable of utilising all the energy resources available to a planet. A Type 2 civilisation is capable of using up all the energy produced by a star. A Type three civilisation uses up all the energy produced by a galaxy. Dyson spheres have become a relative standard in modern science fiction. Larry Niven introduced a variation on the theme: a Dyson Ring in "Ringworld".

Using Drakes equation , as Carl Sagan does here, to calculate the number of potentially advanced technological civilisations out there in our galaxy the numbers of advanced technological civilisations may be, alternatively 10 or a million, depending on how you estimate the last number of this simple sum.

You could add one more factor to that equation, though. How many Type 1 civilisations are there among the 4 billion stars of our galaxy? How many of these are Type 2 civilisations and how many are Type 3?

What is the number of civilisations among those technological civilisations that are capable of producing a Dyson sphere.?

If you used Sagan's initially quite conservative estimate based on the duration of a technical civilisation of only a few decades, then it is probable that one in a hundred of these could evolve a Type 2 civilisation then that would mean that there are unlikely to be Dyson spheres in our galaxy.


However, factoring in a much longer lifespan for a technical civilisation, there may be thousands or tens of thousands of Dyson spheres in our galaxy. They would still be hard to find in a swirling crowd of 400 billion stars I imagine.

In fact, researchers have discovered catalogued many sources of infrared radiation which they deduce could be Dyson spheres, what they call ACs or Astroengineering Constructions.

According to M. Yu Timofeev, N. S. Kardashev and V. G. Promyslov in Acta Astronautica, (2000) again:

"AC are expect to have spectra similar to the black-body spectra because they re-emit all the energy that they absorb, although in the infrared range, as already mentioned. Thus, the effective temperature of these Planckian distributions is expected to lie between 3–300 K with the spectrum peaking between 10 μm and 10 mm. We have analyzed the IRAS database and extracted a catalog of sources whose spectra are similar to the black-body emission."


According to Richard A Carrigan at Fermi lab: of 11224 potential sources of low range emissions identified by the Calgary group (Kwok et al. 1997) that might be amanifestiation of Dyson spheres in our galaxy there are only 16 who have really strong potential.

The bubble is a diameter which compares roughly with the size of our solar system - 33.5 to 29.43 arc minutes.

Logically there can only be one Type 3 civilisation in any galaxy, Type 3s have exclusivity. We don't seem to have one. Unless, that it it is, we have a partially Type three in the Milky Way that uses a lot of the energy from the core of the Milky Way, a core we can't observe.

In any event, the Cygnus bubble is a beautiful object.