Background Contamination of the Project Hephaistos Dyson Spheres Candidates

Project Hephaistos recently identified seven M-dwarfs as possible Dyson Spheres (DS) candidates. We have cross-matched three of these candidates (A, B \& G) with radio sources detected in various all-sky surveys.

The radio sources are offset from the Gaia stellar positions by ∼4.9, ∼0.4 and ∼5.0 arcseconds for candidates A, B, and G respectively. We propose that DOGs (Dust obscured galaxies) lying close to the line-of-sight of these M-dwarf stars significantly contribute to the measured WISE mid-IR flux densities in the WISE W3 and W4 wavebands.

These three stars have therefore been misidentified as DS candidates. We also note that with an areal sky density of 9×10−6 per square arcsecond, Hot DOGs can probably account for the contamination of all 7 DS candidates drawn from an original sample of 5 million stars.

Tongtian Ren, Michael A. Garrett, Andrew P.V. Siemion

Comments: 3 pages, 1 figure, 1 table
Subjects: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA)
Cite as: arXiv:2405.14921 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:2405.14921v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)
Submission history
From: Tongtian Ren
[v1] Thu, 23 May 2024 17:41:09 UTC (134 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14921

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