James Webb Telescope Finds No Dyson Spheres Around Candidate Stars

The James Webb Space Telescope examined two stars that had been highlighted by Project Hephaistos, a survey that screened about five million Milky Way stars for unusual infrared emission that could indicate artificial megastructures known as Dyson spheres. Detailed JWST observations showed that the infrared excess was not produced by any surrounding structure but originated from two distant background galaxies aligned with the foreground stars.

One galaxy is a Hot Dust‑Obscured Galaxy (Hot DOG) whose supermassive black hole heats massive dust clouds, while the other appears to be an extreme star‑forming galaxy. Neither star is encircled by a Dyson sphere, and the study demonstrates improved techniques for distinguishing genuine technosignatures from natural astrophysical sources while adding two intriguing galaxies to the catalog of known objects.