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342 points divbzero | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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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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1. littlestymaar ◴[] No.44408076[source]
Why can't we use the motion of the telescope in space to make a synthetic aperture like SAR imagery satellites do?