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Dyson spheres, the theoretical megastructures that advanced alien civilizations could create to surround their star and extract its energy, have a serious flaw: they are highly unstable. But now an engineer claims to have found a way to stabilize them — and it only requires two stars.
In the 1960s, physicist and thinker Freeman Dyson proposed the concept of these eponymous spheres. He proposed that a sufficiently advanced society would have a huge need for both space and energy. And if they were persistent enough, they could solve both problems by dismantling a planet and turning it into a huge spherical shell. This shell would enclose a star, supporting billions of planets on its surface and absorbing vast amounts of solar energy.
Dyson calculated that a shell made from a Jupiter-mass planet could completely encircle the sun at roughly the same orbit as the Earth. However, gravity within the hollow shell cancels out, meaning there is nothing to hold the shell close to the star. They are free to move in independent directions, implying that soon the star containing the Dyson sphere would simply collide with the shell, destroying it.
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