What is a Dyson Sphere?
The Dyson sphere (or Dyson shell) was originally proposed in 1959 by the astronomer Freeman Dyson in “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infrared Radiation” in Science as a way for an advanced civilisation to utilise all of the energy radiated by their sun. It is an artificial sphere the size of an planetary orbit. The sphere would consist of a shell of solar collectors or habitats around the star, so that all (or at least a significant amount) energy will hit a receiving surface where it can be used. This would create a huge living space and gather enormous amounts of energy. A Dyson sphere in the solar system, with a radius of one AU would have a surface area of at least 2.72e17 km^2, around 600 million times the surface area of the Earth. The sun has a energy output of around 4e26 W, of which most would be available to do useful work. The original proposal simply assumed there would be enough solar collectors around the star to absorb the starlight, not that they would form a
Hello there, I don’t know exactly where I heard the term, “Dyson Sphere” but I would like to know more about it. All that I know is that it has something to do with living inside a hollow planet with a star in the middle. I would appreciate any info on the subject. Thanks! A Dyson Sphere is a hypothetical artificial space platform which very advanced alien civilizations might construct in order to harness all of the light of their parent star. The sphere surrounds the star completely, forming a shell around it of about the radius of the Earth’s orbit. Aliens live on the inside surface of this sphere, which captures all the light from the star since it surrounds it completely. That light is used for the power needs of the civilization. Dyson Spheres are important, because they should be directly detectable from Earth as something completely different from a star, and are one of the few ways of directly indicating the existance of alien life. On the other hand, most astronomers believe t
The Dyson sphere is a hypothetical structure of immense size. It is a sphere that completely (or almost completely) encloses a star, making use of all the energy radiated away by the fusion reactions taking place in its core. The idea of a Dyson sphere was first formalized and popularized by renowned physicist Freeman Dyson in an 1959 article in Science entitled “Search for Artificial Stellar Sources of Infra-Red Radiation,” though he originally got the idea from a 1945 science fiction novel by Olaf Stapledon entitled Star Maker. Our sun has an energy output of around 4 x 10^26 watts, or approximately 100 million times humanity’s total energy consumption throughout the past century every second. If this energy could be harnessed via a Dyson sphere, we would have enough power to sustain a population trillions of times our current population for many eons. The original proposal for a Dyson sphere was not for a solid sphere, but a collection of ~10^5 objects which collectively absorb the
A Dyson Sphere is the result of an advanced civilization taking apart a planet and redistributing it so as to form a spherical surface around a star. The inside makes one enormous living surface which absorbs all available radiation (or most of it). In theory, if the sphere were complete all the star’s radiation would be absorbed. Holes are possibe. All sounds like SiFi, but Black Holes sounded the same way in the 11930’s! Dark Matter and energy are stranger than SiFi!
