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Ringworld exists - Found by Hubble!
Dracul writes: "Niven was a prophet, clearly this object is not a giant hamburger, but rather evidence that Homo Habilis really was Pak!"
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Hardly obscure. Larry Niven's "Known Space" future history is one of the most well-known story universes in SF -- and assuming you've at least heard of it is an understandable assumption for a geek site to make.
Ringworld won Nebula and Hugo awards when it was published. Ten years later the massive continuing flow of fan letters and mathematical papers forced Niven to write a sequel, The Ringworld Engineers, also very good. He followed it up some 12-16 years later by publishing The Ringworld Throne which was mostly crap.
The "Ringworld" is a gigantic artifical ring of solid matter constructed around a star, one million miles wide, six hundred million miles long, and several hundred feet thick. The inner surface is habitable (and, of course, fucking gigantic in surface area).
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Larry Niven, author of the Ringworld books, among others is hardly obscure. He also coined the term flash crowd. Google, as always, turns up a wealth of information.
On a related note, due to the inherent instabilities of a ringworld, I would suggest looking for signs of jets (or other methods of in-space propulsion) around the peripherary of the disk. That should provide significant evidence as to whether it's really a ringworld, or "just" a belt of dust, as the article indicates.