| Title | Building the World's Highest-Resolution Telescope | |
| Date | Tuesday July 10 2018, @02:40PM | |
| Author | chromas | |
| Topic | ||
| from the gigantic-instrument dept. | ||
Submitted via IRC for Fnord666
If Lowell Observatory's Gerard van Belle gets his way, you'll soon be watching an exoplanet cross the face of its star, hundreds of light-years from the Earth. He can't show you that right now, but he should be able to when the new mirrors are installed at the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer in northern Arizona. They're arriving now and should soon start collecting starlight—and making it the highest-resolution optical telescope in the world.
Van Belle recently showed Ars around the gigantic instrument, which bears almost no resemblance to what a non-astronomer pictures when they hear the word "telescope." There are a couple of more traditional telescopes in dome-topped silos on site, including one built in 1920s in Ohio, where it spent the first few decades of its life.
The best way to improve imagery on these traditional scopes is to increase the diameter of the mirror catching light. But this has its limits—perfect mirrors can only be built so large.
[...] A bigger mirror provides two advantages: it catches more light (making fainter objects visible) and it produces a higher-resolution image. If you give up on the first advantage, you can go all in on the second by laying out a handful of small mirrors over a considerable distance. The total mirror area (and therefore light collection) won't be that great, but the tremendous diameter of the array cranks the resolution up to 11. That's the principle behind the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer, a Y-shaped installation with a functional diameter of up to 430 meters.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/07/meet-the-telescope-that-may-soon-show-you-an-exo-eclipse/
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printed from SoylentNews, Building the World's Highest-Resolution Telescope on 2024-04-25 17:48:54