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Two Telescopes Linked To Find Planets
glinden writes: "Two telescopes at the Kech Observatory have been optically linked to form the Keck Interferometer. The resolving power of this combined telescope will apparently be sufficient to see earth-sized planets around nearby stars." quoll contributes a link to NASA's own version of the story, too.
COAST has five in it's array. It's first images were made in 1995.
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Moderator's essentials
But the next leap forward is going to be European... ESO (European Southern Observatory) are constructing two identical telescopes in Chile and Hawaii (project Gemini.) How's that for a long baseline? ;p
And for bluesky "gee whizz" quotient, check out the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope (OWL)...
I've seen a chart somewhere (can't find a link - anyone?) charting aperture (light collecting capacity) of telescopes since Galileo. The Keck and other 10m class telescopes have moved the curve from a nice straight line to an exponetial curve - and that's not allowing for vastly increased computer power, active optics, and out-of-visible band stuff. Truly this is a fantastic time to be interested in astronomy, even (especially?) as an amateur. For a couple of thousand dollars you can do stuff in your yard that was the province of professionals only a few decades ago.
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If the good lord had meant me to live in Los Angeles
Does this remind anyone else of SMP? :)
IANAPA (I am not a professional astronomer)
No, this instrument will not see Earth sized extrasolar planets. Read the article.
This has been thought of before, and not even this past century, but only recently (past 20 years) has the tech been there to actually DO this. The optics and the placement of them, esp in the delay line, has to be quite precise. We're dealing with fractions of wavelengths here.
Basically it works like this: You have two telescopes, and the two light beams are brought together accurately so that they create interference fringes (hence the name interferometer). The interference fringes tell you about the light at a specific spot in the sky, in a very narrow angle (well, a REALLY REALLY narrow angle). From this, maps can be made of spots on very active stars, etc. (None of this is seen directly). Effectively, what you get is the same resolution of a theoretical mirror that's the same diameter of your baseline. You just don't get the light grabbing ablity of that theoretical mirror.
Dim light is the bane of interferometry. In an ideal world with ideal funding, interferometers would be nuked in favor of full sized optics kilometers across, but who's going to foot the bill?
The longer the baseline, the narrower the angle you can see, hence more resolution. Keck is a good start, but the baseline is way too narrow for what people are speculating on this weblog. Maybe someday when someone finds the funding, we'll have a space based interferometer with big mirrors and a few thousand klicks in between for a baseline.
What next? Are they going to add a blue filter on one and a red filter on the other???
hmm... for fun I enjoy launching DDoS attacks against 127.87.42.5
The resolving power of this combined telescope will apparently be sufficient to see earth-sized planets
Whereas the article says:
The Keck Interferometer will be able to detect planets farther from their parent stars, helping to pave the way for future interferometers in space that will look for Earth-like planets, NASA said
To find Earths (at least directly) you have to go to space Don't expect this for another 10 years or so.