Telescope design could capture distant celestial objects with unprecedented detail

[GenesisNemesis]

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-telescope-...ented.html

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.

Can I have one?

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Little paisley aliens wave back at us.

[OakTree500]

While that is awesome, like really really awesome, won't some things we find be a bit misleading [pending on how far away we're looking?].

For example, I remember reading a thing once saying that, essentially, due to speed of light and then the distance of the universe in light years, if some civilisation was looking at us through a telescope 65+ million light years away [if that was possible] they would be seeing dinosaurs on the surface of the earth.

I know we can't see THAT far out, but if we're able to detect something in the "primordial" stages of life, would we then suspect that A) that object/planet/star is even still there and B) that if it is, life flourished like it did hear evolving over those X amount of light years away compared to the distance from the earth [if that makese sense.]

[tomilay]

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-telescope-...ented.html

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.

Can I have one?

Seems like an array of them.

[Fireball]

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-telescope-...ented.html

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.

Can I have one?

Seems like an array of them.

Telescopes like that are arranged in non-periodic arrays so that there will be no data-aliasing when a Fourier Transform is made of the data. That cleans up all kinds of aberrations from a variety of sources.

[trdsf]

While that is awesome, like really really awesome, won't some things we find be a bit misleading [pending on how far away we're looking?].

For example, I remember reading a thing once saying that, essentially, due to speed of light and then the distance of the universe in light years, if some civilisation was looking at us through a telescope 65+ million light years away [if that was possible] they would be seeing dinosaurs on the surface of the earth.

I know we can't see THAT far out, but if we're able to detect something in the "primordial" stages of life, would we then suspect that A) that object/planet/star is even still there and B) that if it is, life flourished like it did hear evolving over those X amount of light years away compared to the distance from the earth [if that makese sense.]

I think it would be enough to spot green (or some other unlikely color) and blue and have the spectral analysis show oxygen and water, even if we don't get details sharper than several hundred kilometers across.  At least that would be a place to keep an eye and a radio ear on.