There are lots of ways to search for technologically advanced aliens. We can listen for them with radio telescopes. We can analyze the atmospheres of other plants to search for biosignatures, or look for their laser light shows.
So far we haven't found any definitive sign of E.T. Maybe advanced aliens just don't exist, or maybe they're extremely rare … or maybe we're just not looking hard enough.
Now, a team of scientists from Uppsala University in Sweden has proposed a new way to scan for advanced civilizations: by looking for disappearing stars or galaxies.
Why would an alien civilization make a star disappear? Perhaps because they're harnessing energy from it using a Dyson sphere--a ball of solar panels around the star that blocks the light from our telescopes. Or maybe the aliens would want to hide their star from an enemy, the authors suggest.
In any case, the scientists analyzed something like 300,000 stars across three different data sets from three different time periods, looking for stars that seemed to disappear. They found 148 candidates.
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