Could We Turn the Sun Into an Extremely Powerful Telescope? (space.com) 29
It's hypothetically capable of "delivering an exquisite portrait of the detailed surface features of any exoplanet within 100 light-years..." writes Space.com.
"It would be better than any telescope we could possibly build in any possible future for the next few hundred years..." While the sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, it has a lot of mass. And in Einstein's theory of general relativity, massive objects bend space-time around them. Any light that grazes the surface of the sun gets deflected and, instead of continuing in a straight line, heads toward a focal point, together with all the other light that grazes the sun at the same time... The "solar gravitational lens" leads to an almost unbelievably high resolution. It's as if we had a telescope mirror the width of the entire sun. An instrument positioned at the correct focal point would be able to harness the gravitational warping of the sun's gravity to allow us to observe the distant universe with a jaw-dropping resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds. That's roughly a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope.
Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, and three times the distance achieved by humanity's most far-flung spacecraft, Voyager 1, which launched in 1977. So not only would we have to send a spacecraft farther than we ever have before, but it would have to have enough fuel to stay there and move around. The images created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers of space, so the spacecraft would have to scan the entire field to build up a complete mosaic image.
Plans to take advantage of the solar lens go back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers have proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight cubesats that would deploy solar sails to accelerate them to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and coordinate their maneuvers, building up an image and sending the data back to Earth for processing...
The telescope already exists — we just have to get a camera in the right position.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article.
"It would be better than any telescope we could possibly build in any possible future for the next few hundred years..." While the sun may not look like a traditional lens or mirror, it has a lot of mass. And in Einstein's theory of general relativity, massive objects bend space-time around them. Any light that grazes the surface of the sun gets deflected and, instead of continuing in a straight line, heads toward a focal point, together with all the other light that grazes the sun at the same time... The "solar gravitational lens" leads to an almost unbelievably high resolution. It's as if we had a telescope mirror the width of the entire sun. An instrument positioned at the correct focal point would be able to harness the gravitational warping of the sun's gravity to allow us to observe the distant universe with a jaw-dropping resolution of 10^-10 arcseconds. That's roughly a million times more powerful than the Event Horizon Telescope.
Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, and three times the distance achieved by humanity's most far-flung spacecraft, Voyager 1, which launched in 1977. So not only would we have to send a spacecraft farther than we ever have before, but it would have to have enough fuel to stay there and move around. The images created by the solar gravitational lens would be spread out over tens of kilometers of space, so the spacecraft would have to scan the entire field to build up a complete mosaic image.
Plans to take advantage of the solar lens go back to the 1970s. Most recently, astronomers have proposed developing a fleet of small, lightweight cubesats that would deploy solar sails to accelerate them to 542 AU. Once there, they would slow down and coordinate their maneuvers, building up an image and sending the data back to Earth for processing...
The telescope already exists — we just have to get a camera in the right position.
Thanks to Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) for sharing the article.
Caution! (Score:2)
Do NOT stare at Sun with remaining eye!
Probably okay to stare at sun ... (Score:2)
... if you are that far away.
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Do NOT stare at Sun with remaining eye!
Great advice, though a little late for some people [ksat.com]... I'd recommend you as a future Science Advisor, but your username gives me pause in this case -- as either a caution or being too on-the-nose -- especially given someone else [politico.com] now on the team. :-)
Well it is a gravitational lense (Score:2)
I mean in theory this can work. Obviously you'd need to block out the light from the sun, but that might be one of the small problems. It's more difficult to align the probe that captures the light that is lensed by the sun.
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I mean in theory this can work. Obviously you'd need to block out the light from the sun, but that might be one of the small problems. It's more difficult to align the probe that captures the light that is lensed by the sun.
Damn, there goes my plans to build a Dyson Sphere!
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The other problem is looking at other places. If your satellites are in one place relative to the Sun then observing anything not behind the Sun is difficult. 542 AU is really hard to maneuver around.
Astronomers want to look at 4pi
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No problem, just build a constellation of receptors forming a sphere around the sun, so they can pick up images from all angles. You know, kind of like Starlink.
Seems like a big issue needs solving (Score:2)
You're talking about very little actual light you want collected, so filtering out ALL of the sun's light is essential. But, even after you block the sun's disk, the solar system is full of dust and rocks that'll be scattering a fair bit of that light towards your receiver in myriad ways.
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Station keeping at that kind of distance doesn't have impossibly high fuel requirements... assuming you can get your imaging device out there in the first place.
But you're not going to want to stay in the plane of the Solar system - by going above or below it you vastly reduce the amount of material between you and what you're trying to image.
Still... aiming precisely enough to catch an exoplanet's surface at that distance? I suspect that's difficult enough to make this idea a non-starter until we find a w
obvious solution (Score:2)
Of course, there are challenges with using the solar gravitational lens as a natural telescope. The focal point of all this light bending sits 542 times greater than the distance between Earth and the sun. It's 11 times the distance to Pluto, ...
Place a few smaller suns in between to re-focus the light ...
A few smaller suns (Score:1)
It's been [er, will be] done [doctorwho.tv], albeit for a different purpose.
Pbs spacetime has a video (Score:3)
How about something smaller? (Score:2)
Jupiter (Score:2)
Why not use Jupiter instead? Smaller and more manageable but maybe you would burn too much fuel maintaining proper orbit.
If it's a focal "point" (Score:2)
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If you were using glass, yes, it would be a point. But, since it's the Sun and its surface changes, the photons would be slightly deflected from a point.
Also, even in photography where there is a focal point, it's not a point like the tip of a pin. If you go down small enough you'd see the point is quite large. The same here. It's a point in the sense that it's where the most photons would end up, but not a literal point.
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Exoplanets aren't point sources, and the sun is not a perfect sphere.
Diffraction and Poisson noise are a bitch (Score:3)
So let's say you had the magic camera hovering out there at 500-something AU.
It'll get flooded with photons from the Sun, which would be considerably closer and considerably brighter than your target 100ly away.
So now you need a sunshade, also magically hovering between your camera and the sun, just the right size to block out the Sun but not the annular region around the Sun where your target signal is coming from.
'cept now, you've got a problem. Because you can't completely block out the Sun. Diffraction means light will bend in around the edges of your sun shade and make a spot roughly (lambda/d)*r in size at your focal surface from the sun. The astute observer will note that for this to work, the r/d term for the occulter is roughly identical to the r/d term for the physical size of the spot made by the telescope defined by the gravitational lens.
Assuming you've made a perfect occulter.
So now you're back to the glare and stray light from a 1 Sun source at 500 AU vs a target at 100 ly. 100 ly/500 AU is about 1e4. Which is how much extra Poisson noise there is from stray light in your image relative to the signal from the target *Sun* nevermind the planet.
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Jupiter? (Score:1)
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Why not try this out using Jupiter first? The distances would be more manageable
The distances would be much greater.
Jupiter bends light less, so it has a much longer focal length.
You would be better off... (Score:2)
using a neutron star or black hole
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Decelerate (Score:2)
So if it has to stay at the 542-ish distance, they'll need to ensure the spacecraft is sufficiently decelarated. There's two options .. travel there on a fucked up trajectory that will take centuries to get there. Or, get out there fast and decelerate. That would likely require a fucked-ton size rocket.
yeah.... (Score:2)
Hell yeah. Let's do it. (Score:2)
Sounds safer than my plan (Score:1)
I was going to turn an extremely powerful telescope into a sun.