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NASA Takes Step Forward In Planet Finding
Spy der Mann wrote to mention a piece at Physorg.com about a major breakthrough in planet finding. From the article: "On a crystal clear, star-filled night at Hawaii's Keck Observatory in Mauna Kea, NASA engineers successfully suppressed the blinding light of three stars, including the well-known Vega, by 100 times. This breakthrough will enable scientists to detect the dim dust disks around stars, where planets might be forming. Normally the disks are obscured by the glare of the starlight. Engineers accomplished this challenging feat with the Keck Interferometer, which links the observatory's two 10-meter (33-feet) telescopes. By combining light from the telescopes, the Keck Interferometer has a resolving power equivalent to a football-field sized telescope. The 'technological touchdown' of blocking starlight was achieved by adding an instrument called a 'nuller.' "
When will we get all our instruments to examine space...in space? I can't imagine a scientific reason to look from the crust of a planet for anything in deep space.
Unless the people in them were, for some reason too advanced for us to know how, storing the energy emitted by the star, a Dyson sphere would be re-emitting all the energy emitted by the star, but at a lower temperature. Therefore, Dyson spheres should be visible in infrared.
Wow, planet finding, so that's what NASA was hookin' up with Google for...
... until you realize that it takes about 10,000x greater reduction in light from the parent star to actually spot Earth sized planets in other Solar Systems. It's a good first step, but they have a long way to go.