According to Māori legend, Māui snared the sun so his brothers didn't have to eat their hangi in the dark.
Something similar could be happening to faraway stars, if a wild new theory about alien civilisations is to be believed.
According to Dan Hooper, an astrophysics professor at the University of Chicago, we might discover E.T. when we see stars move across the sky in the wrong direction.
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As he explains in the paper, published online, over billions of years dark energy will drive stars far apart from one another, "limiting how much energy could one day be extracted from them".
The solution? Grab them while they're still close, and don't let go.
"In particular, we argue that in order to maximise its access to useable energy, a sufficiently advanced civilisation would chose to expand rapidly outward, build Dyson spheres or similar structures around encountered stars, and use the energy that is harnessed to accelerate those stars away from the approaching horizon and toward the centre of the civilisation," Prof Hooper writes.
Dyson spheres, named for scientist Freeman Dyson who dreamed up the concept, is a swarm of satellites that completely surround a star, capturing as much of its energy as possible.
"If an advanced civilisation has already embarked upon a program such as this elsewhere in the universe, it would be expected to provide a number of potentially observable signatures," says Prof Hooper.
That means we should be able to spot it - there will either be a bunch of stars surrounded by Dyson spheres giving off huge amounts of electromagnetic radiation, or a region of space missing stars between 20 and 100 times the mass of our own sun - the ideal size for such an ambitious project, Prof Hooper says.
Solar power is in its infancy on Earth, so it's unlikely we'll be 'doing a Māui' anytime soon. But we have time on our side - the sun's not expected to get too hot for life on Earth for another billion years or so.
And don't worry about E.T. stealing the sun - according to Prof Hooper's calculations, it's far too small to bother with.
Newshub.
