We have incredibly powerful telescopes that give us stunning views of the universe and allow us to look back to the early days of the universe. These observatories include: James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is an incredible engineering feat that cost billions of dollars and took decades of work.
But what if we had access to a much better telescope that already exists? It wouldn’t be your typical telescope. It wouldn’t have lenses. But it would be much more powerful than any telescope we’ve ever built.
This telescope uses: sun itself.
To give you a sense of how powerful a solar-based telescope can be, consider JWST. With a mirror measuring 21.3 feet (6.5 m) in diameter, JWST can achieve a resolution of about 1/10th of an arcsecond, which is about 600 times better than the human eye. At that resolution, the telescope can see details on a coin 25 miles (40 km) away, or capture the pattern of a regulation football 342 miles (550 km) away.
relevant: 12 Discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope That Changed Our Understanding of the Universe
Here’s another example: Event Horizon TelescopeIt is actually a network of individual instruments distributed around the world. The telescopes provide us with a way to carefully coordinate the elements. Impressive image of the surrounding gas disk giant black hole. To achieve this, an impressive resolution of 20 microarcseconds was achieved. At that resolution, the telescope was able to spot an orange object sitting on the surface. moon.
But what if we want to go bigger? Bigger telescopes require huge networks of dishes or antennas. Solar SystemBoth would require enormous leaps in our technological capabilities.
Fortunately, there is already a giant telescope at the center of our solar system: the Sun.
The sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, but it has a lot of mass. And Einstein‘S theory general relativityA massive object bends space.hour Around. All the light passing by the Sun’s surface is refracted and instead of continuing in a straight line, it travels towards the focus along with all the other light passing by the Sun at the same time.
Astronomers are already using this effect. Gravitational lensStudy the farthest places galaxy ~ in universe. When light from that galaxy passes near a massive cluster of galaxies, the mass of the cluster amplifies and magnifies the background image, allowing us to see much farther away than usual.
“Solar gravitational lensing” can lead to almost unbelievably high resolutions. It’s as if there were a telescope mirror the entire width of the Sun. An instrument placed at the right focus point can take advantage of the Sun’s gravitational bending. gravitation It will allow us to observe the distant universe with an incredible resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds, making it about a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope.
Of course, there are challenges to using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focus of all this light bending is distance between earth and sun. 11 times Distance to PlutoAnd that’s three times the distance traveled by the farthest spacecraft ever traveled by humans. Voyager 1It was released in 1977.
So not only do we have to send spacecraft farther than ever before, we also have to have enough fuel to stay there and move. The image created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers. spaceTherefore, the spacecraft must scan the entire field to build a complete mosaic image.
Plans to use solar lensing date back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight CubeSats that could deploy solar sails to accelerate to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and maneuver to build images and send the data back to Earth for processing.
Strange as it may seem, the concept is not far from reality. And what can this kind of super telescope achieve? For example, if we were to target the nearest exoplanet, Proxima b, it would provide a resolution of 1 km. Considering that the JWST follow-up plan aims to achieve the imaging capability of exoplanets where the entire planet is within a few pixels, solar gravitational lensing puts this idea to shame. It would be able to exquisitely depict the detailed surface features of any exoplanet within 100 light years, not to mention all the other astronomical observations that could be achieved.
It is an understatement to say that this will be better than any telescope known. It will be better than any telescope we will be able to build in the next hundred years. The telescope already exists. We just need to put the camera in the right place.
