The Ultimate Space Telescope Would Use the Sun as a Gravitational Lens
An old idea gets new attention.
A team of researchers from the NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab have proposed using the biggest object in our solar system, the Sun, as a cosmic magnifying glass. There's the catch of getting the telescope in position with the sun and how long that would take. However, if it were done then instead of capturing an image a that's a couple of pixels we'd be able to capture 1000×1000 pixel images — enough to see a 10km square of a planet's surface — from 100 light years away. The Hubble can't even manage that when looking at Mars.
Leave a Reply