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GMoromisato ◴[] No.44401068[source]
In case anyone is wondering, we are (sadly) very far from getting an image of this planet (or any extra-solar planet) that is more than 1 pixel across.

At 110 light-years distance you would need a telescope ~450 kilometers across to image this planet at 100x100 pixel resolution--about the size of a small icon. That is a physical limit based on the wavelength of light.

The best we could do is build a space-based optical interferometer with two nodes 450 kilometers apart, but synchronized to 1 wavelength. That's a really tough engineering challenge.

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nico ◴[] No.44401110[source]
How big would the telescope/mirror/lens need to be to get a picture of something in the Alpha Centauri system, 4.37 light years away?

Also, could the image be created by “scanning” a big area and then composing the image from a bunch of smaller ones?

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joshvm ◴[] No.44402225[source]
It's a lot easier to reason about this using angular resolution, because that's normally what the diffraction limit formula is in reference to. If you know the angular diameter of the system (α) and the wavelength (say λ=500 nm for visible), you can use α ≈ λ/d and solve for the aperture of the telescope (d).

That puts a basic limit on the smallest thing you can resolve with a given aperture. You can use the angular diameter of the planet and the resolution you're after. For Alpha Centauri A it's 8.5 milli arc-second, so O(1 μas) for a 100px image? That's just for the star!

The Event Horizon Telescope can achieve around 20-25 μas in microwave; you need a planet-scale interferometer to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event_Horizon_Telescope It's possible to do radio measurements in sync with good clocks and fast sampling/storage, much harder with visible.

I'm not super up to date on visible approaches, but there is LISA which will be a large scale interferometer in space. The technology for synchronising the satellites is similar to what you'd need for this in the optical.

https://www.edmundoptics.com/knowledge-center/application-no...

https://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0303634

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schobi ◴[] No.44402481[source]
How far off are we still for doing this with visual light?

Let's say you build single photon detectors and ultra precise time stamping. Would that get us near? Today, maybe we don't have femtosecond time stamping and detectors yet. But that is something I can imagine being built! Timing reference distribution within fs over 100s of km? Up to now, nobody needed that I guess.

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1. joshvm ◴[] No.44404688[source]
The biggest issue is the sheer separation required. EHT operates in mm wave light, visible is 4-6 orders of magnitude shorter wavelength. There are several smaller scale interferometers. They can already do quite impressive things because even a 50m baseline is better than any optical telescope that exists.

The way that timing works for EHT is each station has a GPS reference that's conditioned with a very good atomic clock - for example at SPT we use a hydrogen maser. The readout and timing system is separate from the normal telescope control system, we just make sure the dish is tracking the right spot before we need to start saving data (sampling around 64 Gbps).

I'm not sure what the timing requirements are for visible and how the clock is distributed, but syncing clocks extremely well over long distances shouldn't be insurmountable. LISA needs to solve this problem for gravitational waves and that's a million+ km baseline.

Some problems go away in space. You obviously need extremely accurate station keeping (have a look how LISA Pathfinder does it, very cool), but on Earth we also have to take continental drift into account.