The Spider Stellar Engine: a Fully Steerable Extraterrestrial Design?

Abstract

A long-lived civilization will inevitably have to migrate towards a nearby star as its home star runs out of nuclear fuel. One way to achieve such a migration is by transforming its star into a stellar engine, and to control its motion in the galaxy. We first provide a brief overview of stellar engines and conclude that looking for technosignatures of stellar engines has taken two roads: on the observational side, hypervelocity stars have been the target of such searches, but without good candidates. On the theoretical side, stellar engine concepts have been proposed but are poorly linked to observable technosignatures. Since about half the stars in our galaxy are in binary systems where life might develop too, we introduce a model of a binary stellar engine. We propose mechanisms for acceleration, deceleration, steering in the orbital plane and outside of the orbital plane. We apply the model to candidate systems, spider pulsars, which are binary stars composed of one millisecond pulsar and a very low-mass companion star that is heavily irradiated by the pulsar wind. We discuss potential signatures of acceleration, deceleration, steering, as well as maneuvers such as gravitational assists or captures. Keywords: Pulsars: Spiders, Technosignatures, Stellar engine, Interstellar travel