The article makes it sound like only a 30-meter "Fresnel" optics can allow to resolve an earth-size object within 30 light-years.
The fact is that any conventional 30-meter telescope can resolve an earth-size object within 30 light-years (circa 6000Angstrom in wavelength). Spatial resolution can be determined by the ratio of wavelength to diameter of the optics:
6000A / 30m ~ 2e-8 radian ~ 0.004 arcsec.
So a 30m telescope can resolve an object in angular size of 0.004arcsec at 6000Angstrom.
At the distance of 30 light-years, the earth-size object looks like
6400km / 30lyr ~ 2e-8 radian ~ 0.004 arcsec.
So that's that. This telescope doesn't give us any special resolving power per optics size. So the advantage is merely its light weight.
Since the precise alignment of holes is required for this optics to work, I can see why this project got kicked out by ESA. It's probably too premature to attempt in deploying this kind of precision engineering in space today.
The two causes you mentioned are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The question is rather if we accelerate the rate of increase in mean temperature anomaly. The Sun is still and will always be the dominant factor for changing the weather on Earth.
I posted the following on a Deep Impact thread a long ago. It seems appropriate to recycle this comment again.
...Exploration and investment are the reasons for a [space] mission like this.
The former -- exploration -- is what NASA and scientists will advertise in front. Why? Because we know so little about comets. Imagine, if the judgement day comes and we have to "shoot down" one of these in order to save the humanity, wouldn't you be rather comfortable to know what and how comets are really made of? We really do not know what happens to a comet when we toss a stick of dynamite into it, as its structural integrity is not well known.
The latter -- investment -- is the second and the foremost important reason. In order for a super-power nation to sustain its technological supremacy in this world, its government must invest its money for the advancement of engineering and science [*]. The investment to a NASA's mission like this may not seem as important as an investment toward curing cancer, etc., but such assessment is near-sighted. For example, building of a scientific instrument requires a miniaturization of electronic component (in order to reduce its size and weight). Each component is also certified to withstand harsh cosmic environment (sudden changes in temperature and severe bombardment by cosmic radiation). The skills learned through these R&D may eventually trickle down to the industry, and hence possibly leading to development of affordable high-tech components (e.g., IC chips in a decade ago). Basically the high cost of R&D may be paid by the government and the industry would benefit from such learned knowledge. It is not too surprising that a medical breakthrough on cancer may come from the spread of affordable technology obtained through space research.
[*] There was no time in history that a single nation had dominated the world without its technological advantage.
But at the bottom line, the choice is up to you and other constituents in the nation. You ask your representatives to choose either to feed the hungry right now or to invest on the future. I'm inclined to choose the latter.
The first generation of stars (called Population III stars [wikipedia.org] had essentially no heavier elements, because they did not exist at the time, and models suggest that such "metal-free" stars could have been much heavier than current stars.
Yes, the lack of heavy metals demands stars to be very massive earlier. Generally speaking, pure hydrogen ball of gas wouldn't go fusion quite efficiently (CNO nuclear chain can be much more efficient than p-p chain). To make it happen, it needs to increase its internal temperature and pressure. Hence, naturally a heavier, massive star is preferred to form in the pure hydrogen environment. But there is a limit to that, too, once the radiation pressure becomes strong enough (reaching the Eddington limit, modified or not), the radiation force would break the star's envelope apart. But a lack of metal in its atmosphere would reduce the effect of radiation pressure for the astronomically short period of time. The question is how short that time scale would be, and even if so, how much mass can it really hold during that brielf quasi-steady state? There is no model for this; just a bunch of sketchy hypotheses.
I won't be too surprised if there were a bunch of 200 solar mass stars back then. But a 1000 solar mass star? I seriously doubt that any good hypothesis exists for that.
The interesting thing here is that we can now see so far back, that we might be looking at the light from that first generation of stars.
In this particular study, I see the evidence to be very weak. Too many free parameters to choose in the model.
just to clarify, I don't believe in the crackpot theories suggested there. But the basic message that came with the post (which means, this original article is sort of misleading and open to other speculations).
1000 or 5000 light years is too close for using "redshift" to measure its motion of a star. Its own internal motion within a Galaxy would gravely affect the measurements.
For anything close (a few hundred light years), a triangulation should be adequate. But any farther distance out (but within our own galaxy), it actually becomes hard to measure its accurate distance. Likely you could use the spectral distribution of the star to determine what kind of star it is and figure out its distance based on its brightness (provided that you have some "standard" candle, i.e., a star with well known brightness).
Draw a bunch of small dots on a sheet of paper; take it to xerox; set it to magnify by 120% and 140% or something; xerox the dotted paper with the zooming settings to transparencies.
Now pick a dot on the original paper. Place the transparencies on the top of the same dot in the same orientation. You see all the other dots (except the one you picked) moving away from the selected dot.
Now do the same with a different dot. What do you see?
You see the same effect. Choose another, and another. They are all the same. (also the farther away dots are, the larger displacement they make).
It's an example of the Einstein's principle of equivalence in 2-D. The real math for that theory is complicated in 3-D, but a demo in 2-D boils down to this simple exercise with a copier machine.
I just skimmed through the two articles posted in arxiv. It seems that the discussion on "age" or "distance" is merely based on statistical analysis of its brightness. I'm not going to try to explain what it means (I'm not really good at the topic), but basically the quoted age of 14Billion years is based on their estimate from the model vs. data, which says that these detected IR sources are likely 1Gyr younger than the cosmological age of the Universe.
So they don't really detect an object that old. They are seeing a bunch of objects all over the sky, and guessing what kind of things would constitute the distribution of IR light as seen in their data.
It's too far to measure distance by triangulation.
The distance is most probably measured via Doppler shift of emission or absorption line features. The farther the object is, the significant the Doppler effect would be. That's the basis for the Hubble's law (or the expansion of the Universe).
Eta Carinae is the only unquestionably massive star with the mass of 100+ solar masses. It is also suspeted that it nears a theoretical upper limit for the mass of a star to form, as its own radiation becomes so critically strong that it blows apart its own stellar atmosphere and shed a tremendous amount of material into interstellar space (eta Carinae is this near critical phase). In other words, the radiation pressure of a massive star eventually overcome gravitational force, hence leading to a very unstable form of a star when the mass exceeds about 150 or 200 times the Sun's mass. The formation of a 1000-solar-mass star has been theoretically hypothesized, but none seems to be strongly convincing.
In the past, some astronomers thought they found a case for 1000-solar-mass star; but it turned out that, with the Hubble's high resolution imager, the 1000-solar-mass star wasn't a star; it was a bunch of stars in a cluster. Historically speaking, one tends to embarrass himself by claiming a detection of 1000-solar-mass stars.
I have no landline at home (been that way for more than 3 years now) and was using my cell phone with international calling cards to make phone calls oversea. But the connection generally was terrible in sound quality and there were intermittent signaling problems, too. On top of that, my mom has some hearing problem so that the sound quality was very important to us.
Now with skype, it's fairly easy for me to boost the signal from my laptop while making a phone call. She appreciates the clarity of voice (a bit of signal delay is present, though). It costs me less than what I used to pay with my calling card, too. Also it was very easy to install binary tar-ball onto my Debian system (took me less than a minute to install). The user base is fairly good, too, so that it's simple to look up whenever I have some technical problem with using the service.
I'm sure skype isn't for everyone; but if you are tech-savvy enough, it's not a bad substitute for other VOIP services.
No no, the major achievement of Hinode isn't the size of the detector.
It's the large size of the telescopic mirror used for this mission. It's extremely hard to build a solar telescope with a large mirror (50cm for SOT? I forgot) because a large mirror would increase heat intake from the Sun into the optic system. Unless one finds a way to release its heat intake from the satellite, it keeps heating up. And that's really not good thing for the satellite and instruments on board. The trick is to release most of unnecessary heat by guiding some excess light (esp in IR) out of the optical path and Hinode has successfully managed to achieve it.
It is somewhat illogical, in the difficult time of allocating funding in science, to make a decision to revisit the Moon first and then to discuss the justification for this new technological/scientific endeavor.
This is almost like a por-barrel project for Texas in the national scale...
Dadoo is correct. A very massive star has to have a hotter core at its center in order to support its heavier stellar mass (the hotter the gas, the higher the gas pressure, and hence the more effective to support its own weight in order not to collapse into a singularity, i.e., a blackhole). And the rate of nuclear reaction is often proportional to a higher power of Temperature at the core. That means the hotter the core is, the faster it is to synthesize heavier elements from proton to Helium.
As the same star evolves, it depletes hydrogen (proton) soon at the core. But because the star is still massive, it enables to burn helium, then carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and eventually it starts burning more heavier elements via nuclear processing (til iron -- Fe -- which cannot be burned to generate nuclear energy).
This heavier element synthesis is accelerated by high temperature and pressure (basically) at the core of a star. For a very massive star (Mass ~ 100 sun) it lives only about a few million years before it begins to show the sign of aging (heavier metallic elements in its atmosphere). And when these stars die, their explosions would disperse these heavier elements throughout its neighboring space (also upon explosion, an ample flux of neutrons would bombard other atoms and eventually the atoms trap the neutrons to form heavier elements than Fe; Strontium, uranium, plutonium and gold are good examples of such process).
In a small star like the Sun, the synthesis process takes place very slowly (in the time scale of a few billion years). So it's only natural that astrophysicits think today that there must have been a lot of very massive stars formed in the early days of the Universe to explain its metallicity level seen today.
Ugh, no. I'm not a catalog person, but I'm sure that Naval Observatory or other institutions have more extensive star catalogues. Gliese may be the easily accessible catalogue, however.
The stars in the solar neighborhood is not necessarily a good representation of stellar population in this galaxy. That's basically what I am trying to say.
The velocity resolution down to 1 m/s is not technologically demonstrated in space, AFAIK. I don't want to think about the size of a grazing element to put on board and then launch it into space in order to achieve such a goal...
I don't know if you ever worked on a satellite (I do), but absolute determination of the position and velocity vector of a satellite in space is not trivial. If they are to use the JWST to detect a Doppler shift associated to a planetary motion at a few m/s, then we may need to know the motion of the satellite at or better than 1 m/s or so. I don't think that's part of the criteria for the JWST mission (but then the defense technology is heavily involved with the construction of its main body, so you might know something that I don't??).....
Someone like Geoff Marcy has done these 1 m/s detection (not trivial, but quite plausible) with Keck, etc. So it happens we do understand the motion of the Earth around the center of the Solar system and some minute vibration triggered by Earth. Terra firma makes it less difficult, IMHO.
The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.
A detection of Doppler motion due to planetary perturbation is miniscule. It could take an accuracy of less than one km/s, or more likely a few dozen meter per second. It is extremely hard to make a high resolution spectroscopic instrument for a space satellite to meet that criterion. Calibrating out all the uncertainties in the motion of the satellite would become an issue as well. That said, I don't think the James Webb ST would do much in this topic.
Besides, the designers for JWST don't strongly desire to have a spectrographic instrument on board the JWST. It may end up as a purely imaging mission, which is extremely boring for physicists.
The verification is better done with adaptive optics + Echelle grating at V, R or IR band from ground.
the link is provided by the article linked. It sounds interesting to me, though referring to the special "relativity" is a bit too much; basically one end of the tubes experience more normal force than the other (narrow end) would result in a net forward force, which drives the system.
Of course the key is the generation of the cavity and its material, and the magentron design.
Nontheless, it sounds interesting to me. Not an expert on these systems, though.
In Astronomy, you can drastically increase the resolution of a picture you're taking by taking a dozen pictures spread out over a large area. If they're at the same time, then you can interpolate the missing data and produce a *really* high resolution picture. I'd be surprised if we aren't subconsciously doing the same thing with our eyes.
I sense you misunderstood about high-resolution imaging in astronomy here.
(1) The resolution of an image is primarily determined by the optics, not the detector.
The sampling rate of the said image differs by what numbers of pixel elements you
choose to use.
(2) You don't make a high resolution picture by "dithering" or "interpolating".
What you are doing (describing) here is to reconstruct the true photon distribution
obtained with your optical system (to beat out Nyquist limit). At the end
unless you deconvolve the image, the resolution after interpolation stays
exactly as expected theoretically by the optics. You just have finer samplings
of an object taken in the image.
I know this is a bit too much for today's slashdot audience to digest, but...
Slashdot Mirror
The article makes it sound like only a 30-meter "Fresnel" optics can allow to resolve an earth-size object within 30 light-years.
The fact is that any conventional 30-meter telescope can resolve an earth-size object within 30 light-years (circa 6000Angstrom in wavelength). Spatial resolution can be determined by the ratio of wavelength to diameter of the optics:
6000A / 30m ~ 2e-8 radian ~ 0.004 arcsec.
So a 30m telescope can resolve an object in angular size of 0.004arcsec at 6000Angstrom.
At the distance of 30 light-years, the earth-size object looks like
6400km / 30lyr ~ 2e-8 radian ~ 0.004 arcsec.
So that's that. This telescope doesn't give us any special resolving power per optics size. So the advantage is merely its light weight.
Since the precise alignment of holes is required for this optics to work, I can see why this project got kicked out by ESA. It's probably too premature to attempt in deploying this kind of precision engineering in space today.
The two causes you mentioned are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The question is rather if we accelerate the rate of increase in mean temperature anomaly. The Sun is still and will always be the dominant factor for changing the weather on Earth.
I posted the following on a Deep Impact thread a long ago. It seems appropriate to recycle this comment again.
...Exploration and investment are the reasons for a [space] mission like this.
The former -- exploration -- is what NASA and scientists will advertise in front. Why? Because we know so little about comets. Imagine, if the judgement day comes and we have to "shoot down" one of these in order to save the humanity, wouldn't you be rather comfortable to know what and how comets are really made of? We really do not know what happens to a comet when we toss a stick of dynamite into it, as its structural integrity is not well known.
The latter -- investment -- is the second and the foremost important reason. In order for a super-power nation to sustain its technological supremacy in this world, its government must invest its money for the advancement of engineering and science [*]. The investment to a NASA's mission like this may not seem as important as an investment toward curing cancer, etc., but such assessment is near-sighted. For example, building of a scientific instrument requires a miniaturization of electronic component (in order to reduce its size and weight). Each component is also certified to withstand harsh cosmic environment (sudden changes in temperature and severe bombardment by cosmic radiation). The skills learned through these R&D may eventually trickle down to the industry, and hence possibly leading to development of affordable high-tech components (e.g., IC chips in a decade ago). Basically the high cost of R&D may be paid by the government and the industry would benefit from such learned knowledge. It is not too surprising that a medical breakthrough on cancer may come from the spread of affordable technology obtained through space research.
[*] There was no time in history that a single nation had dominated the world without its technological advantage.
But at the bottom line, the choice is up to you and other constituents in the nation. You ask your representatives to choose either to feed the hungry right now or to invest on the future. I'm inclined to choose the latter.
The first generation of stars (called Population III stars [wikipedia.org] had essentially no heavier elements, because they did not exist at the time, and models suggest that such "metal-free" stars could have been much heavier than current stars.
Yes, the lack of heavy metals demands stars to be very massive earlier. Generally speaking, pure hydrogen ball of gas wouldn't go fusion quite efficiently (CNO nuclear chain can be much more efficient than p-p chain). To make it happen, it needs to increase its internal temperature and pressure. Hence, naturally a heavier, massive star is preferred to form in the pure hydrogen environment. But there is a limit to that, too, once the radiation pressure becomes strong enough (reaching the Eddington limit, modified or not), the radiation force would break the star's envelope apart. But a lack of metal in its atmosphere would reduce the effect of radiation pressure for the astronomically short period of time. The question is how short that time scale would be, and even if so, how much mass can it really hold during that brielf quasi-steady state? There is no model for this; just a bunch of sketchy hypotheses.
I won't be too surprised if there were a bunch of 200 solar mass stars back then. But a 1000 solar mass star? I seriously doubt that any good hypothesis exists for that.
The interesting thing here is that we can now see so far back, that we might be looking at the light from that first generation of stars.
In this particular study, I see the evidence to be very weak. Too many free parameters to choose in the model.
just to clarify, I don't believe in the crackpot theories suggested there. But the basic message that came with the post (which means, this original article is sort of misleading and open to other speculations).
if your post don't get modded up, I'd be pissed.
Let's just leave it at that.
[Well, the slashdot admins could tell us: "why don't you submit these with better headlines?"]
1000 or 5000 light years is too close for using "redshift" to measure its motion of a star. Its own internal motion within a Galaxy would gravely affect the measurements.
For anything close (a few hundred light years), a triangulation should be adequate. But any farther distance out (but within our own galaxy), it actually becomes hard to measure its accurate distance. Likely you could use the spectral distribution of the star to determine what kind of star it is and figure out its distance based on its brightness (provided that you have some "standard" candle, i.e., a star with well known brightness).
I'm not gonna comment on this post. But I'd like to know who's moderating this "interesting"??
I supposed I should meta-moderate again these days...
Draw a bunch of small dots on a sheet of paper; take it to xerox; set it to magnify by 120% and 140% or something; xerox the dotted paper with the zooming settings to transparencies.
Now pick a dot on the original paper. Place the transparencies on the top of the same dot in the same orientation. You see all the other dots (except the one you picked) moving away from the selected dot.
Now do the same with a different dot. What do you see?
You see the same effect. Choose another, and another. They are all the same. (also the farther away dots are, the larger displacement they make).
It's an example of the Einstein's principle of equivalence in 2-D. The real math for that theory is complicated in 3-D, but a demo in 2-D boils down to this simple exercise with a copier machine.
I just skimmed through the two articles posted in arxiv. It seems that the discussion on "age" or "distance" is merely based on statistical analysis of its brightness. I'm not going to try to explain what it means (I'm not really good at the topic), but basically the quoted age of 14Billion years is based on their estimate from the model vs. data, which says that these detected IR sources are likely 1Gyr younger than the cosmological age of the Universe.
So they don't really detect an object that old. They are seeing a bunch of objects all over the sky, and guessing what kind of things would constitute the distribution of IR light as seen in their data.
It's too far to measure distance by triangulation.
The distance is most probably measured via Doppler shift of emission or absorption line features. The farther the object is, the significant the Doppler effect would be. That's the basis for the Hubble's law (or the expansion of the Universe).
Eta Carinae is the only unquestionably massive star with the mass of 100+ solar masses. It is also suspeted that it nears a theoretical upper limit for the mass of a star to form, as its own radiation becomes so critically strong that it blows apart its own stellar atmosphere and shed a tremendous amount of material into interstellar space (eta Carinae is this near critical phase). In other words, the radiation pressure of a massive star eventually overcome gravitational force, hence leading to a very unstable form of a star when the mass exceeds about 150 or 200 times the Sun's mass. The formation of a 1000-solar-mass star has been theoretically hypothesized, but none seems to be strongly convincing.
In the past, some astronomers thought they found a case for 1000-solar-mass star; but it turned out that, with the Hubble's high resolution imager, the 1000-solar-mass star wasn't a star; it was a bunch of stars in a cluster. Historically speaking, one tends to embarrass himself by claiming a detection of 1000-solar-mass stars.
Here is my reasoning: my parents love it.
I have no landline at home (been that way for more than 3 years now) and was using my cell phone with international calling cards to make phone calls oversea. But the connection generally was terrible in sound quality and there were intermittent signaling problems, too. On top of that, my mom has some hearing problem so that the sound quality was very important to us.
Now with skype, it's fairly easy for me to boost the signal from my laptop while making a phone call. She appreciates the clarity of voice (a bit of signal delay is present, though). It costs me less than what I used to pay with my calling card, too. Also it was very easy to install binary tar-ball onto my Debian system (took me less than a minute to install). The user base is fairly good, too, so that it's simple to look up whenever I have some technical problem with using the service.
I'm sure skype isn't for everyone; but if you are tech-savvy enough, it's not a bad substitute for other VOIP services.
No no, the major achievement of Hinode isn't the size of the detector.
It's the large size of the telescopic mirror used for this mission. It's extremely hard to build a solar telescope with a large mirror (50cm for SOT? I forgot) because a large mirror would increase heat intake from the Sun into the optic system. Unless one finds a way to release its heat intake from the satellite, it keeps heating up. And that's really not good thing for the satellite and instruments on board. The trick is to release most of unnecessary heat by guiding some excess light (esp in IR) out of the optical path and Hinode has successfully managed to achieve it.
It is somewhat illogical, in the difficult time of allocating funding in science, to make a decision to revisit the Moon first and then to discuss the justification for this new technological/scientific endeavor.
This is almost like a por-barrel project for Texas in the national scale...
Dadoo is correct. A very massive star has to have a hotter core at its center in order to support its heavier stellar mass (the hotter the gas, the higher the gas pressure, and hence the more effective to support its own weight in order not to collapse into a singularity, i.e., a blackhole). And the rate of nuclear reaction is often proportional to a higher power of Temperature at the core. That means the hotter the core is, the faster it is to synthesize heavier elements from proton to Helium.
As the same star evolves, it depletes hydrogen (proton) soon at the core. But because the star is still massive, it enables to burn helium, then carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and eventually it starts burning more heavier elements via nuclear processing (til iron -- Fe -- which cannot be burned to generate nuclear energy).
This heavier element synthesis is accelerated by high temperature and pressure (basically) at the core of a star. For a very massive star (Mass ~ 100 sun) it lives only about a few million years before it begins to show the sign of aging (heavier metallic elements in its atmosphere). And when these stars die, their explosions would disperse these heavier elements throughout its neighboring space (also upon explosion, an ample flux of neutrons would bombard other atoms and eventually the atoms trap the neutrons to form heavier elements than Fe; Strontium, uranium, plutonium and gold are good examples of such process).
In a small star like the Sun, the synthesis process takes place very slowly (in the time scale of a few billion years). So it's only natural that astrophysicits think today that there must have been a lot of very massive stars formed in the early days of the Universe to explain its metallicity level seen today.
Ugh, no. I'm not a catalog person, but I'm sure that Naval Observatory or other institutions have more extensive star catalogues. Gliese may be the easily accessible catalogue, however.
The stars in the solar neighborhood is not necessarily a good representation of stellar population in this galaxy. That's basically what I am trying to say.
IIRC, Gliese catalog lists only those stars found within 70 light-year radius from the Sun.
In that very tiny sample, year, you are probably right.
But if you look at the whole Galaxy, you are not correct. The Sun is surely a tiny dwarf star.
The velocity resolution down to 1 m/s is not technologically demonstrated in space, AFAIK. I don't want to think about the size of a grazing element to put on board and then launch it into space in order to achieve such a goal...
....
I don't know if you ever worked on a satellite (I do), but absolute determination of the position and velocity vector of a satellite in space is not trivial. If they are to use the JWST to detect a Doppler shift associated to a planetary motion at a few m/s, then we may need to know the motion of the satellite at or better than 1 m/s or so. I don't think that's part of the criteria for the JWST mission (but then the defense technology is heavily involved with the construction of its main body, so you might know something that I don't??).
Someone like Geoff Marcy has done these 1 m/s detection (not trivial, but quite plausible) with Keck, etc. So it happens we do understand the motion of the Earth around the center of the Solar system and some minute vibration triggered by Earth. Terra firma makes it less difficult, IMHO.
The 16 are planet candidates at this point, until verified by spectroscopic measurement of their parent stars' wobbles, which probably can't be done until the James Webb Space Telescope files in 2013.
A detection of Doppler motion due to planetary perturbation is miniscule. It could take an accuracy of less than one km/s, or more likely a few dozen meter per second. It is extremely hard to make a high resolution spectroscopic instrument for a space satellite to meet that criterion. Calibrating out all the uncertainties in the motion of the satellite would become an issue as well. That said, I don't think the James Webb ST would do much in this topic.
Besides, the designers for JWST don't strongly desire to have a spectrographic instrument on board the JWST. It may end up as a purely imaging mission, which is extremely boring for physicists.
The verification is better done with adaptive optics + Echelle grating at V, R or IR band from ground.
I am high on medicine. Now leave me alone, would you?
I had some points to make, but not sure what they were any more.
By the way I am sure the design, as it is, will fail.
Like I said, the key is to design a perfect cavity system.
It's an interesting reading here:
w yertheory.pdf
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/av/sha
the link is provided by the article linked. It sounds interesting to me, though referring to the special "relativity" is a bit too much; basically one end of the tubes experience more normal force than the other (narrow end) would result in a net forward force, which drives the system.
Of course the key is the generation of the cavity and its material, and the magentron design.
Nontheless, it sounds interesting to me. Not an expert on these systems, though.
Their vision is clear: plan for the future.
It's easier to think and deal with today's problem today.
Instead, these guys have decided to tackle tomorrow's problem
now, just to see if they can.
Clearly they are operating at a different philosophy.
In Astronomy, you can drastically increase the resolution of a picture you're taking by taking a dozen pictures spread out over a large area. If they're at the same time, then you can interpolate the missing data and produce a *really* high resolution picture. I'd be surprised if we aren't subconsciously doing the same thing with our eyes.
I sense you misunderstood about high-resolution imaging in astronomy here.
(1) The resolution of an image is primarily determined by the optics, not the detector.
The sampling rate of the said image differs by what numbers of pixel elements you
choose to use.
(2) You don't make a high resolution picture by "dithering" or "interpolating".
What you are doing (describing) here is to reconstruct the true photon distribution
obtained with your optical system (to beat out Nyquist limit). At the end
unless you deconvolve the image, the resolution after interpolation stays
exactly as expected theoretically by the optics. You just have finer samplings
of an object taken in the image.
I know this is a bit too much for today's slashdot audience to digest, but...