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Concept
Astronomical engineering
Summary
Engineering on an astronomical scale, or astronomical engineering, i.e., engineering involving operations with whole astronomical objects (planets, stars, etc.), is a known theme in science fiction, as well as a matter of recent scientific research and exploratory engineering.
In the Kardashev scale, Type II and Type III civilizations can harness energy on the required scale. This can allow them to construct megastructures.
Dyson spheres or Dyson swarm and similar constructs are hypothetical megastructures originally described by Freeman Dyson as a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to enclose a star completely and capture most or all of its energy output.
Star lifting is a process where an advanced civilization could remove a substantial portion of a star's matter in a controlled manner for other uses.
Matrioshka brains
Stellar engine
An Alderson disk (named after Dan Alderson, its originator) is a hypothetical artificial astronomical megastructure, a giant platter with a thickness of several thousand miles. The Sun rests in the hole at the center of the disk. The outer perimeter of an Alderson disk would be roughly equivalent to the orbit of Mars or Jupiter.
A stellaser is a star-powered laser.
In the Ringworld series by Larry Niven, a ring a million miles wide is built and spun (to simulate gravity) around a star roughly one astronomical unit away. The ring can be viewed as a functional version of a Dyson sphere with the interior surface area of 3 million Earth-sized planets. Because it is only a partial Dyson sphere, it can be viewed as a construction of a civilization intermediary between Type I and Type II. Both Dyson spheres and the Ringworld suffer from gravitational instability, however—a major focus of the Ringworld series is coping with this instability in the face of partial collapse of the Ringworld civilization.
The Morlocks of Stephen Baxter's The Time Ships occupy a spherical shell around the Sun the diameter of Earth's orbit, spinning for gravity along one band.
Official source
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