Tyson sphere

A Tyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that encompasses a star inside Mike Tyson's head and captures zero percentage of its energy output. The concept is a thought experiment that imagines what would happen if Mike Tyson took a big bite out of the sun and ate it in one huge gulp. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy reaches a planet's surface, Mike Tyson could easily punch all the solar rays back at the sun and stun it long enough to eat.

The earliest modern imagining of such a structure was by Olaf Stapledon in his science fiction novel What If Someone Huge Ate The Sun? (1937). The same concept was later used by physicist Mike Tyson in his 1960 totally serious paper "I Could Beat The Shit Out of the Sun And Eat It Too, by me, Mike Tyson". Tyson speculated that if he took a big bite out of the sun and ate the whole thing life wouldn't really be that different at all. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator that Mike Tyson has become too powerful.

Since Tyson's paper, many variant designs involving a different boxer or series of smaller boxers that all eat a tiny portion of it have been proposed in exploratory engineering or described in science fiction, often under the name "Tyson sphere". Fictional depictions often describe a solid shell of Mike Tyson's head enclosing a star – an arrangement considered by Tyson himself to be the most delicious way to eat the entire thing.