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Six Optical Telescopes Combined Into One
00Paddy writes: "Starstuff.org reports on how astronomers successfully combined the light from six independent telescopes to form a single, high-resolution image of a distant multiple-star system using interferometry techniques. The combined telescopes gives a effective mirror diameter of 430 meters, much bigger than any single mirror could be made. This technology will lead to images of sunspots of distant stars and maybe images Jupiter-sized planets orbiting distant stars."
Notice it includes ?rated=5 - that means all /. readers who use that URL will give it a rating of 5 out of 6.
:)
l es/1087.asp, which won't make you vote for anything and which won't cause the entire thing to refresh into a frameset the instant it loads.
Way to mess up their stats
It also links directly to the article, which will instantly reload you to the frameset. A better URL is http://www.starstuff.org/default.asp?cover=/artic
If you can make a 430-meter diameter telescope in this way, why can't a 10,000-meter diameter telescope be made by doing the same thing with hundreds or thousands of telescopes all across a hemisphere?
Because you need a direct optical link between the telescopes, and because you want the mirror setup you use for this to be as stable as possible (relative motion will change path lengths and muck up your image reconstruction).
You can get around this with radio telescopes because you can sample and timestamp the received signals with timing resolution much finer than the period of the radio waves. To do this with light, we'd need light sensors and electronics at least a million times faster than we have now, and atomic clocks based on mid-UV light instead of microwaves).
A giant interferometer could be built in space, of course.
You can get around this with radio telescopes because you can sample and timestamp the received signals with timing resolution much finer than the period of the radio waves.
Measuring the wave collapses the wave function. Measuring then combining is not the same as combining THEN measuring. Those radio telescope arrays can't be called true interferometers.