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What about an array of space telescopes creating a kind of "virtual lens"? Putting aside the engineering scale and cost of such a project, would something like
by chrsw 4y ago
What about an array of space telescopes creating a kind of "virtual lens"? Putting aside the engineering scale and cost of such a project, would something like that even be possible? Or would that be pure science fiction?
- terramex 4y agoIt is possible in principle, but gets harder as wavelength of captured light gets smaller and so far it is done only for long radio waves on planet scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interferometry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astronomical_optical_interfero... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aperture_synthesis
- ugh123 4y agoThis is what the Event Horizon telescope does https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope
- shakezula 4y agoThere are proposals for scientific missions utilizing the gravitational lensing of light around the Earth (or other planets) being fed into a network of satellites to do exactly this. And as another comment pointed out, the EHT already does this for imaging black holes, just with satellites on Earth.
- wthomp 4y agoAs others have mentioned, this is similar to how the event horizon telescope works today! However, there’s no free lunch. By using arrays of telescopes instead of a single filled dish/mirror, they are missing a lot of information. Imagine a telescope the size of the earth, but you only use light from a few dozen spots on the surface and let the rest fall through. This is why they had to do all that complicated image reconstruction processing to create the image shown in the papers.