WISE/CatWISE Constraints On Dysonian Waste-Heat Technosignatures In Nearby Galaxies
We search for galaxy-scale (Dysonian) waste heat in the mid-infrared using WISE. Starting from the 2MASS Redshift Survey (2MRS), we cross-match to CatWISE2020 and AllWISE, apply standard MIR AGN/starburst vetoes (Stern, Assef R90, Jarrett), and treat W1 and W2 as stellar baselines and W3 and W4 as constraining bands.
For each galaxy and for blackbody waste heat temperatures T=150-600 K, we convert W3/W4 photometry into conservative 3-sigma per-galaxy upper limits on the bolometric waste heat luminosity using the WISE bandpass (RSR) color correction. The resulting distributions have median caps of ~(5-9) x 10^8 L_sun across T=150-600 K.
Aggregated at the population level, the one-sided 95% upper bound on the fraction of nearby galaxies that could host waste heat above a given threshold monotonically decreases with threshold and asymptotes to ~1/6500 at high thresholds (set by the sample size).
Sensitivity transitions from W4 at T <= 200K to W3 at T >= 300K. Interpreted with the AGENT formalism, a fiducial Milky Way like stellar luminosity L_=3 x 10^10 L_sun implies typical per galaxy caps of alpha = L_wh/L_ <= 1.7-2.9% over T=150-600 K (e.g., alpha <= 1.8% at T=300 K). At T ~= 300K, no more than f_95 ~= 1.61 x 10^-4 (~= 0.0161%) of nearby galaxies can host KIII-scale systems reprocessing >= 21% of a Milky Way-like stellar luminosity into ~ 300K waste heat.
WISE W1−W2 versus W2−W3 (Vega) color–color diagram for the 2MRS cross matched galaxy sample, shown to visualize how our MIR AGN/starburst rejection interacts with plausible galaxy scale waste heat (KIII) spectral energy distributions. — astro-ph.GA
Bo-Lun Huang, Zhen-Zhao Tao, Tong-Jie Zhang
Comments: 18 pages, 12 figures, 2 tables. Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journal
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
Cite as: arXiv:2601.07297 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2601.07297v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2601.07297
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Submission history
From: Bolun Huang
[v1] Mon, 12 Jan 2026 08:09:56 UTC (2,241 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.07297
Astrobiology, SETI,
