A study of five million solar systems in the Milky Way galaxy — our galaxy — apparently showed some stars with signs in their light signatures consistent with them being surrounded by Dyson structures. These come in three possible types: A Dyson ring is just like it sounds, a ring surrounding a star; a Dyson swarm is a collection of structures all in synchronous orbit, while a Dyson sphere completely encloses the star. The purpose is to gather as much of the star's energy as possible.

This study, done with the aid of a computer algorithm, appears to have identified 60 stars emitting such signals.

Disclaimer: Probably not. But still interesting. 

Scientists carried out a survey of five million distant solar systems with the help of 'neural network' algorithms and it took an interesting turn when they found nearly 60 stars surrounded by what appeared as "giant alien power plants."

Among the 60 stars, seven of them - which were M-dwarf stars and ranged between 60 per cent and 8 per cent the size of the Sun - were seen releasing high infrared 'heat signatures,' as per the astronomers.

In the new study, the astronomers said that the outer space "phenomena cannot easily account for the observed infrared excess emission."

This discovery has hinted at the existence of a long-hypothesised alien power-generation technology in the Milky Way galaxy.

This technology is the aforementioned Dyson structures.

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While these structures are named for Freeman Dyson, a physicist and mathematician who proposed the building of a Dyson sphere to contain and capture all of a star's energy output, the concept actually goes back to a 1937 novel, Star Maker, by author Olaf Stapledon.

But as far as this study actually having detected such structures? Color me skeptical.

Even though some scientists believe that there may be other explanations for excess infrared signatures discovered, Suazo said, "The most fascinating explanation could be actual Dyson spheres."

Looking at the data from nearly five million sources, the researchers have created a catalogue of potential Dyson spheres.

The scientists studied the signs of partially completed alien megastructures which hold the possibility of emitting excess infrared radiation.

“This structure would emit waste heat in the form of mid-infrared radiation that, in addition to the level of completion of the structure, would depend on its effective temperature,” they said.

What isn't said is what other explanations might cause these mid-infrared emissions; while I'm a biologist and not a cosmologist, it seems to me that a G-sequence star like our sun, were it to be surrounded by a cloud (or clouds) of gas or dust, may well also emit such an IR signature. And that's a lot more likely than an alien civilization that would by necessity be thousands, or millions of years ahead of us, technologically.

But that doesn't mean that there isn't life elsewhere in the universe — maybe even intelligent life. While it's hard to pin down the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy, it's certainly in the hundreds of billions, and many of those stars have planets. Now, moving into biology, a subject with which I am more conversant — observations here on our planet, where life arises and persists in some pretty hostile places — I guess that life is likely to arise anywhere conditions permit, requiring only a solvent and an energy source. But intelligent life is probably exceedingly rare, and this study is only the barest grasp at the very slightly possible glimpse of something that may be a sign of some kind of structure. 

If you ask me, the people that released this have jumped the gun.