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Infrared telescopes should be able to spot Dyson sphere like constructs to 652 light years

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Professor Zaza, University of Georgia, hase extended the idea of Freeman Dyson and has shown that a supercivilization has to use ring-like megastructures around pulsars instead of a spherical shell. He reexamined the same problem in the observational context and he shows that facilities of modern IR telescopes (VLTI and WISE) might efficiently monitor the nearby zone of the solar system and search for the IR Dyson-rings up to distances of the order of 0.2kpc, corresponding to the current highest achievable angular resolution, 0.001mas. In this case the total number of pulsars in the observationally reachable area is about 64 ± 21. He shows that pulsars from the distance of the order of ∼ 1kpc are still visible for WISE as point-like sources but in order to confirm that the object is the neutron star, one has to use the UV telescopes, which at this moment cannot provide enough sensitivity.

The search of infrared rings is quite promising for distances up to 200 parsecs (652 light years), where one will be able to monitor potentially 64 ± 21 pulsars by using the IR instruments. Observation of distant pulsars (up to 1000 parsec or 3262 light years), although will significantly increase the total number of potential objects – to 1600 ± 530, but at this moment the UV instruments cannot provide such a level of sensitivity.

Rapidly rotating pulsars are very powerful and harvesting their energy would be quite very useful for super cilivization.