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posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 25 2020, @04:14PM   Printer-friendly
from the peek-a-boo dept.

New telescope design could capture distant celestial objects with unprecedented detail:

Researchers have designed a new camera that could allow hypertelescopes to image multiple stars at once. The enhanced telescope design holds the potential to obtain extremely high-resolution images of objects outside our solar system, such as planets, pulsars, globular clusters and distant galaxies.

"A multi-field hypertelescope could, in principle, capture a highly detailed image of a star, possibly also showing its planets and even the details of the planets' surfaces," said Antoine Labeyrie, emeritus professor at the Collège de France and Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur, who pioneered the hypertelescope design. "It could allow planets outside of our solar system to be seen with enough detail that spectroscopy could be used to search for evidence of photosynthetic life."

In The Optical Society's (OSA) journal Optics Letters, Labeyrie and a multi-institutional group of researchers report optical modeling results that verify that their multi-field design can substantially extend the narrow field-of-view coverage of hypertelescopes developed to date.

Large optical telescopes use a concave mirror to focus light from celestial sources. Although larger mirrors can produce more detailed pictures because of their reduced diffractive spreading of the light beam, there is a limit to how large these mirrors can be made. Hypertelescopes are designed to overcome this size limitation by using large arrays of mirrors, which can be spaced widely apart.

Researchers have previously experimented with relatively small prototype hypertelescope designs, and a full-size version is currently under construction in the French Alps. In the new work, researchers used computer models to create a design that would give hypertelescopes a much larger field of view. This design could be implemented on Earth, in a crater of the moon or even on an extremely large scale in space.

Building a hypertelescope in space, for example, would require a large flotilla of small mirrors spaced out to form a very large concave mirror. The large mirror focuses light from a star or other celestial object onto a separate spaceship carrying a camera and other necessary optical components.

"The multi-field design is a rather modest addition to the optical system of a hypertelescope, but should greatly enhance its capabilities," said Labeyrie. "A final version deployed in space could have a diameter tens of times larger than the Earth and could be used to reveal details of extremely small objects such as the Crab pulsar, a neutron star believed to be only 20 kilometers in size."

[...] Incorporating the multi-field addition into hypertelescope prototypes would require developing new components, including adaptive optics components to correct residual optical imperfections in the off-axis design. The researchers are also continuing to develop alignment techniques and control software so that the new camera can be used with the prototype in the Alps. They have also developed a similar design for a moon-based version.

Supersharp images from new VLT adaptive optics

More information: Zongliang Xie et al, Hypertelescope with multiplexed fields of view, Optics Letters (2020). DOI: 10.1364/OL.385953

Journal information: Optics Letters Provided by The Optical Society


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  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:39PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 25 2020, @06:39PM (#975561) Journal

    Wow. That is high. Considering space shuttle Columbia was unable to reach the ISS, let alone the Hubble; and considering that reaching the Hubble in any capable shuttle was at the limits of what the shuttle could do, it is impressive for some Starlink sats to be about 2.5 times as far out.

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