The instrument settings of the James Webb Space Telescope are still in progress and we should wait until the summer before real scientific research begins. However, we have seen that the first image published by the Nasashowing a star and galaxies in the background once the first setting of all the mirrors hexagonal made, was already spectacular from the point of view of the resolution.
We are quickly convinced of this by comparing this image with that of the same star and region of the celestial vault observed by the defunct Spitzer Telescope to whom we owe many discoveries in the field ofinfrared.
This is hardly surprising since the JWST has a collecting surface seven times greater than the HST and it was expected to have a sensitivity 100 times greater than those achieved by previous space telescopes dedicated to observations in the infrared (from 1 to 27 microns of wavelengths) like Iras, ISO and Spitzer.
We will therefore not be surprised by the rumors that are circulating about already intriguing and potentially revolutionary observations which would begin to emerge from the treatment of other targets being observed to make it possible to make the JWST instruments operational, for example MIRI (Mid-InfraRed Instrument), a production of a European consortium under the aegis of theESA which will operate in the mid-infrared (or thermal, i.e. in the window spectrum 5 – 28 microns) to which the CEA and Cnes contributed.
The observations in question would have a disturbing interpretation if one were to accept the calculations and ideas proposed in the late 1960s by two astronomers original Ukrainian and whose reputation is well established for one of them since it is Carl Saganthe great pioneering exobiologist of Seti program. In fact, the father of Carl Sagan was from Khmelnytskyi Oblast in what is now western Ukraine.
Iossif Chklovski, the Soviet Carl Sagan
The other astronomer is, like many brilliant researchers of the Soviet era, certainly unknown to the general European public and yet he is the Soviet Sagan as far as the Seti program is concerned. This is Iossif Chklovski born on 1er July 1916 in Hloukhiv, in the oblast of Sumy in Ukraine, and died on March 3, 1985.
As astronomer Kirill Maslennikov explains in the video below, Chklovski made a name for himself by being the first to correctly interpret the origin of the radiation of the crab nebulanamely a episode synchrotron produced by electrons ultra-relativists moving along the lines of the magnetic field of his pulsar central. But, as can be seen in the same video, his contributions and insights go far beyond, whether with the famous parting at 21 cm where the unified model of active galactic nuclei.
One of the very interesting popular videos of astronomer Kirill Maslennikov, stationed at the famous Pulkovo astronomical observatory located south of Saint Petersburg. It deals with the contributions of Iossif Chklovski. To obtain a fairly accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. The subtitles in Russian should then appear. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Choose “French”. © Qwerty
Iossif Shklovski was a radio astronomer just like Frank Drake, at the origin of his famous equationand his colleague and collaborator Nikolai Kardachevalso heavily involved in the equivalent of the Seti program in Soviet Russia and to whom we owe the famous classification of civilizations in matter of consumptionenergy.
Chklovski and Sagan also knew each other very well since they co-wrote a book translated into English in 1966 under the title ” Intelligent Life in the Universe which can be considered the first serious exposition of the subject. This led them in particular to take a closer look at a possible technosignature of an advanced extraterrestrial civilization having reached with multiple dyson spheres the “type III” on theKardachev scalethat is, having at its disposal all the power emitted by the galaxy in which it is located.
Galaxies filled with Dyson spheres?
Let’s go back to what Futura has already written about Dyson’s sphere concept. We owe it to the famous physicist sadly deceased who, in 1960, had sent a letter published in the newspaper Science. Influenced by the science fiction book titled StarMakerby Olaf Stapledon, Freeman Dyson set out to check whether the ideas evoked in Stapledon’s work were credible from the point of view of physicalwithout worrying about the daunting technological problems encountered in making them a reality.
By extrapolating the growth curve of the consumption of energy and matter of humanity, inevitably, we come to the conclusion that we will end up needing all the energy released by the Sun every year. Dyson then calculated that using a mass material equivalent to that of Jupiter, it is possible to surround our Sun with a semi-solid shell, two to three meters thick, capable of trapping the radiation of our star. This is what a type II civilization would do with its star, on the famous Kardachev scale.
However, according to the laws of thermodynamicseven using a large part of the energy thus available, the shell will heat up and re-emit in the infrared like a black body of excellent quality. the spectrum of a star is close to that of a black body, but a somewhat fine observation quickly shows that it is actually chopped up by a series of lines ofabsorption even, sometimes, bands. This would not be the case with the object studied by Dyson.
The method he proposed to discover extraterrestrial civilizations is therefore to go in search of cold objects radiating in the infrared like an almost perfect black body and whose size would be of the order of a few astronomical units.
The concept made a fortune under the name of “Dyson sphere” and it was notably popularized by Carl Sagan in his works, for example Cosmos.
Sagan and Chklovski extended the idea of the technosignature proposed by Dyson in the case of a type III civilization and it is this signature that the JWST would begin to see at the level of at least one galaxy in the infrared.
Caution is needed, because as we explained, the adjustment of the telescope is not finished and it could be an artifact of one of the poorly calibrated instruments.
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