Planets outside of the Solar System are dull. We can only see them by looking at the reflected rays of their parent star. We can only use a pinprick to identify its position.
It would take a lens much larger than anything we can build to reveal the details of these distant worlds. One larger than Earth. It's wider than Jupiter.
Cosmic-scale lenses exist. Heavy objects like the Sun can be used as telescopes because of the way that mass dimples the fabric of space.
It is not just theoretical. More than a century ago, the concept of so-called gravitational lensing was first demonstrated and has since been used to push the limits of how far into the Universe we can see.
But using our star's roiling mass to unveil delicate shifts in coloration and pattern of an exoplanet is a whole other story.
Slava Turyshev, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, proposed a technique in 2020 to resolve light around a planet into an image.
Achieving this would require a spaceship that could cover a large area of space, something that would push the limits on materials, fuel, and speed of current technology.
Two physicists from the US have proposed a new method for using the Sun's space-distorting mass as a way to focus the faint light from exoplanets into a meaningful image.
While sending a Hubble-sized space observatory into the frozen outlands of our Solar System is what they use to weave the light into a ring around the Sun into a clear picture, the process requires just a single snapshot of light.
The researchers used weather satellite data to create a smeared funneling of light known as an Einstein ring. The distorted image was deciphered by their algorithm, which recreated a clearly recognizable world we call home.
Earth might be viewed using the sun. Madurowicz et al., ApJ, 2022.
The process could result in images of far-off objects 1,000 times more precise than we can hope for using modern technology.
Bruce Macintosh says that they want to take pictures of planets that are around other stars that are as good as the pictures we can make of planets in our own Solar System.
With this technology, we hope to take a picture of a planet 100 light-years away that has the same impact as Apollo 8's picture of Earth.
Astronomers have found signs of more than 5,000 worlds around stars in the Milky Way since the first exoplanet was discovered in the early 1990s.
The signs are similar to footsteps in the dark. We can figure out how big the planet is and how fast it is moving. We might look into the composition of its atmosphere and its temperature.
The rest is inspired by the characteristics of planets in our own Solar System.
The potential for alien biology is one of the things that could be told by resolving features of clouds, oceans, mineral deposits, and even chasms and mountains in exoplanets.
By taking a picture of another planet, you could see that it has forests and oceans, which would make it hard to argue that it doesn't have life.
The journey such an observatory would need to make is the biggest obstacle to employing this particular technique.
The farthest object ever created by a human is the Voyager 1 probe. It has covered 23 billion kilometers since 1977. The gap between Earth and the Sun is 156 times larger.
A trip that would take at least a century to make using all of our present know-how is the destination required for an exoplanet-spying telescope that uses the Sun as a lens.
Innovative solutions to space travel could get us there sooner. It is1-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-65561-6556
The Astrophysical Journal published this research.
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