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Gas Clouds As Giant Telescopes

Posted by timothy on from the repurposing dept.

allrong writes "Astronomers have found a way to harness clouds of gas in space to make a natural 'telescope' more powerful than any manmade telescope currently in operation. Read the press release or take a look at the images and description of the process."

6 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. Practicality? by digital+bath · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Sure, they might be able to see things in super-fine detail. But how often is there going to be a gas cloud that acts as a perfect lens for whatever you want to look at?

    It's still a cool idea, however.

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    1. Re:Practicality? by pVoid · · Score: 5, Insightful
      Follow the second link...

      They aren't looking to make nice Kodak pictures to hang up on walls. They are measuring x-rays and radio waves from very far away. And they seem to be extrapolating the values by using the velocity of the earth. The gas clouds don't need to be focused... the focus is done by taking many many 'blurry' images, and constructing a non blurry one. It seems the point is to actually catch signals that are otherwise too faint... rather than 'zoom' in more on things that are too small.

      (That's what I understood at least).

    2. Re:Practicality? by Guppy06 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      "But how often is there going to be a gas cloud that acts as a perfect lens for whatever you want to look at?"

      Um... what don't you want to look at?

  2. Figures by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Slashdot links to story about some pretty fascinating science and the highest rated comment is a fart joke.

    Somehow I am not surprised.

  3. Re:THIS IS NOT A NEW TECHNIQUE! by bentfork · · Score: 2, Insightful
    AAaaaaahh!

    This IS different than just removing twinkling stars.

    This is similar (using your biological example) to using cell membranes to magnify DNA.

    Cant anyone read anymore?

  4. Re:uh... by shadowbearer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    and the really interesting part is that we could not possibly have ever done this without the processing power and algorithms we have nowadays.

    If these things keep improving...holy moley....now, for the first time in history, processing power is one of the strongest points in observations, rather than telescope resolution, light gathering power, or spectrum bandwidth.

    We need to get better scopes in orbit. Combine that with computer processing and... Wow.

    The future is so bright....I need lead shielding ;-)

    I haven't been that active in watching advances in astronomy for the last couple years, but what we're doing nowadays with 20 year old tech (HST (admittedly somewhat upgraded) and more modern ground telescopes is astounding. We've learned more in the last 10 years than we learned in the previous 200. Astounding. Astonishing. I wish I could have beat graduate level calculus, so I could be doing this for a career.

    Wow.

    SB

    --
    It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.