The largest telescope humans will ever build

The largest telescope humans will ever build - Gravitational solar lens

2018-05-14

[unlisted] 147K views, 5.00K likes, 171 dislikes audio only

Since their invention, telescopes have been used by astronomers to study the stars. As technology and theory advanced a need for larger and larger telescopes grew. Where the first telescopes were light enough to pick up and move, modern scopes take up entire specialized buildings and our largest is planned to be 40 meters wide.

But we're starting to hit the limit of how large we can make our telescopes as the cost to make these behemoths increases exponentially with size. A 1 meter telescope costs up to 250,000 whereas the monster 40m one will cost almost a billion.

In this video we explore a design for what would be the largest telescope humanity will ever use. It would allow us to take images of an exoplanet from over 100 light years away at better resolution than hubble is able to see mars from earth. The proposed FOCAL spacecraft uses a weird property of space called gravitational lensing to bend light around the sun as if it was a giant lens.

Codyslab aragoscope: /youtube/video/5RacK2VwqEk

Satellite images: /youtube/video/cjClTnZ4Xh4

Radio telescope: /youtube/video/aeah3fFYlnA

Why jupiter is a bad option: https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/jupiter-as-a-gravitational-lens.101614/

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.06351

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