Gas Clouds As Giant Telescopes

allrong writes "Astronomers have found a way to harness clouds of gas in space to make a natural 'telescope' more powerful than any manmade telescope currently in operation. Read the press release or take a look at the images and description of the process."

Ok, but...

[slimsam1]

Will we be able to focus on something of our choosing, not just something that happens to be on the other side of a gas cloud?

Don't call it a telescope.

[The Terrorists]

Extracting data from these requires as many monitoring facilities and personnel as a real telescope. If you call this a telescope budget cutters will claim we don't need to build new hardware out of the federal budget.

Re:Practicality?

[ddd2k]

Im guessing the real value of this is the huge range range of the "telescope", image the focal length of a lens with diameter of a planet, now how many times larger is that compared to the hubble? although the resolving power is questionable.
Hence, it is not useful for the contribution to existing research but discovering new phenomenons in the universe.

ban

[mlknowle]

The first person to make a joke about, err, 'human produced' gas clouds should receive a lifetime ban from Slashdot. After me, that is...

Doesnt it mean

[happyhippy]

you'd have to know the structure of the gas cloud down to its minute detail? How in hell do you find out that?
For instance how do you calculate the thickness of the gas cloud between the earth and this quasar its supposedly magnifying in on? As the thickness of the clous would affect the radio waves of the quasar more than a thinner gas cloud. Whats the yardstick to measure the gas cloud?

THIS IS NOT A NEW TECHNIQUE!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using a technique similar to this in my own research for years, except on a microscopic scale... I know, I know, microscopy sounds like a completely different field from astonomy, but they share surprising similarities. In both sciences, we use powerful instruments to see what we can't see with the naked eye. A telescope is a powerful magnifier whose focal point is at infinity, since for all intents and purposes the stars are infinitely far away. A microscope is like a telescope except its focal point is a few millmeters to a few hundred microns. Therefore, both instruments can take advantage of the same optical techniques.

In microscopy, the limiting resolution is the scattering of light due to small air or water currents (depending on what your speciman is submersed in)--the effects are similar to twinkling stars caused by Earth's atmosphere. Sometimes you can evacuate the sample chamber and remove the effect, but this isn't practical for biological or aqeous specimans.

Therefore, a technique called "reverse diffraction engineering" is used to remove the scattering effects. Powerful software is needed to analyze the subtle image changes over time. The software then digitally removes the scattered light and creates an image with a much higher resolution.

A similar technique is being used to effectively remove the atmosphere above earth based telescopes, creating a "vacuum column" above them. I don't have a link, but this technique was demonstrated last year at a European observatory. A full blown telescope is in the works. This technique could render the Hubbel telescope, and the need to put telescopes in space, obsolete.

Re:The practical usefullness of this?

[allrong]

The gas cloud technique will hopefully allow increase the resolution of the radio images. Most radio telescope images tend not to make "pretty pictures" of the type produced by Hubble and other optical telescopes. However, any increase in the detail that can be seen of the radio jets should be very useful. There is still much that is not understood about the processes the generate the jets.

Applicability to General Astronomy?

[mattr]

Boy I wish someone would post some links of a site like Slashdot for Science Articles which has less trolls.

Anyway, this news is absolutely fabulous. Nobody has been asking though about how applicable this might be in general astronomy, for example how much of the sky could be covered with this technique, and whether anything like this effect could be created with manmade gaseous clouds.

At the very least, does anyone have a link to the original scientific draft? I am curious about how extensive these clouds are, and whether we can just "dial in" any part of the sky which is covered by such a cloud for a significant portion of the year. In particular would this be something that could be used to get images of extrasolar planets? Who cares what wavelength, the new European lunar probe is going to use X-rays to see what elements are available, maybe we can do the same with these clouds? Only problem is the targets will obviously be more than 50 light years away in this case.

Natural Telescopes

[16977]

When I was on an island research station last summer, I was astounded to walk out of the building one morning and see waves crashing against the base of a lighthouse, 20 miles away on the edge of the horizon. Something about the air had magnified the distant object so that I could see it with the naked eye. Ever since then I've wondered if it was possible to make an extremely powerful telescope by using gas. It's easy to get magnification by changing eyepieces, but the hard part is getting a nice wide primary lens/mirror to collect light and keep the image from getting blurry. A gas lens would solve that problem by using a huge bubble of heated air -- if you could get it to hold its shape well enough. This isn't exactly the same thing, since it uses radio refraction through charged particles rather than light refraction through air, but I'd like to imagine that it's a start.