Alien civilizations might re-engineer their stars to give their planets a longer lifespan.
Researchers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, or SETI, have suggested many times that technologically-advanced aliens might build structures we can see from Earth, such as Dyson swarms: objects surrounding a star to capture as much of its energy as possible. A few other SETI researchers have suggested that instead of just trying to harvest solar energy from their host star, really ambitious alien civilizations could, in theory, actually blow material away from the star to make it live longer. And that effort to buy civilization another few billion years of survival might also be visible to astronomers here on Earth.
Columbia University astrophysicist Matthew Scoggins and astronomer David Kipping published their work in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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