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there was an interesting comment to the gizmodo article that was posted:
'The biggest axe against it being an alien megastructure project is the fact its an F-type star. F-types only live a couple billion years, depending on mass.
But the drop in the radiant flux... a sustained drop. That could be something far more interesting. If you could do stellar engineering... you could draw the material off an F-type star while altering its core. You could reduce the mass to a G or K star, greatly increasing its lifespan... and gaining trillions upon trillions of tons of raw material with which to build an alien megastructure. It would require core manipulation, as simply removing mass from the star would cause the core to expand and potentially nova. So you’d have to find a way to remove the helium already generated from the core in order to prevent catastrophic instability. Normally helium only migrates outwards very slowly. Most of the sun’s core hydgrogen will be replaced with helium over time, as material takes hundreds of millions of years to migrate out, so that when all the core hydrogen is used it starts fusing helium. The pressure from the outer layers is what allows this fusion collapse, and the additional heat forces the outermost layers to expand further - and that’s why the solar surface expands in the red-giant phase.
This would be a concept as far out on the edge of insanity as possible. But if you have the right technologies available then such a manipulation would be dead simple. It would be ultimately easier than trying to stabilize a red dwarf - although the oops factor would be that one mistake and your engineering effort goes *Boom*.
More importantly, you’d have all the energy you needed to run a form of Helium-to-carbon fusion process... then you could assemble with the energy the components of a Dyson island system. An F-Class star would have more than enough mass and energy to make the production of a Dyson system... a net positive. You could probably produce another sphere capable of englobing a red dwarf as a bonus prize while getting a star that could live another 7-10 billion years out of the F-type. You could even use some of the excess helium to do core manipulation on the red dwarf to stabilize it.
And for those who brush this off as fantasy - well it is. To our current technological level. But if you can operate on that scale and have achieved some form of interstellar spaceflight - especially anything to do with FTL, then you already have the tools to disrupt and destroy stars. Re-engineering them... that would be a massive challenge... BUT! If you were to master that, you would be able to create any kind of second home you like for your civilization without having to destroy an existing civilization or take away a habitable planet. '
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