NASA Wants to Turn the Sun Into a Giant Telescope

Bright Side

To capture unprecedented, high-resolution images of distant exoplanets, NASA is actively developing a mind-bending mission that uses the Sun’s massive gravitational field as a giant magnifying glass. This revolutionary concept relies on Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, where our star's immense gravity bends and focuses light from alien worlds located up to 100 light-years away.   Credit: A Horseshoe Einstein Ring: By ESA/Hubble & NASA, Bulwersator, https://tinyurl.com/2e7eandk HST-Smiling-GalaxyCluster: By NASA/ESA - https://tinyurl.com/mjj5yz9m, https://tinyurl.com/bd2uwa4n Gravitational lens: By NASA Ames/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle - https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6314, https://tinyurl.com/4f9bs9wj Gravitationell-lins-4: By NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI),G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA - https://tinyurl.com/3kwvvy67, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1727600 Voyager spacecraft model: By NASA - smd-prod.s3.amazonaws.com., https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=66602695 Advanced Composite Solar Sail System deployment: By NASA - https://www.nasa.gov/mission/acs3/, https://tinyurl.com/2mczsxmp Advanced Composite Solar Sail System testing: By NASA - https://www.nasa.gov/mission/acs3/, https://tinyurl.com/4h7ceb6p Webb Telescope Milestone: Completion of Telescope Element: By NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Michael McClare, Sophia Roberts, Michael Menzel, https://tinyurl.com/32s3e25t Radio Galaxy Hercules A: By NASA, ESA, S. Baum and C. O'Dea (RIT), R. Perley and W. Cotton (NRAO/AUI/NSF), and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), https://tinyurl.com/ua6dh2j5 1996-04-a-web: By Andrea Dupree (Harvard-Smithsonian CfA), Ronald Gilliland (STScI), NASA and ESA. - http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/1996/04/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=620655 Fomalhaut with Disk Ring: By NASA, ESA, P. Kalas, J. Graham, E. Chiang, E. Kite (University of California, Berkeley), M. Clampin (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), M. Fitzgerald (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), and K. Stapelfeldt and J. Krist (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) - https://tinyurl.com/2unue78k, https://tinyurl.com/yas74jjr Asteroid P/2010 A2: By NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (UCLA), https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/p2010-a2/ P-2013 R3 Hubble: By NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (University of California, Los Angeles) - https://tinyurl.com/mtuvahav, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=126200573 NASA-Galaxies15k: By NASA, ESA, P. Oesch (University of Geneva), and M. Montes (University of New South Wales) - https://tinyurl.com/mudkj4sd, https://tinyurl.com/y2e4eyjw Apollo 17 Lunar Roving Vehicle: By NASA / Harrison H. Schmitt - https://tinyurl.com/yc4wz294 http://grin.hq.nasa.gov/ABSTRACTS/GPN-2000-001139.html, https://tinyurl.com/34mxcr9d CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0: Earth from TPS LightSail 2: By Kevin M. Gill - https://flic.kr/p/2jnfMhy, https://tinyurl.com/43h2v5d3 CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0: NGC4038 Large 01: By W4sm astro, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87256935 CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0: CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0: The Sunburst Arc PSZ1: By ESA/Hubble, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83857626 Jewelled ring: By ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, A. Nierenberg, https://tinyurl.com/mzzsynjw Cosmic snake pregnant with stars: By ESA/Hubble, https://tinyurl.com/yr6a746a On the hunt for newborn stars: By ESA/Hubble, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=73630564 Satellite: By ilarioseb/sketchfab, https://skfb.ly/oWu9I Voyager 1&2: By Your Local Loser/sketchfab, https://skfb.ly/o7NDy Proxima Centauri: By ESO./L. Calçada/Nick Risinger, https://www.eso.org/public/videos/eso1629d/ PDS 70 - eso2111b: By ALMA (ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/Benisty et al., https://tinyurl.com/2dee6ewh The Egg Nebula: By ESA/Hubble & NASA, B. Balick (University of Washington), https://tinyurl.com/343tpujs water plumes on Europa: By ESA/Hubble, https://tinyurl.com/2vrupafn deep blue planet: By NASA, ESA, M. Kornmesser, https://esahubble.org/images/heic1312a/ M87 supermassive black hole: By EHT Collaboration - https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2105a, https://tinyurl.com/3txk4xtb Sagittarius Astar: By EHT Collaboration - https://www.eso.org/public/images/eso2406a, https://tinyurl.com/3vbxmjc6 Animation is created by Bright Side.

Transcript

00:00So check this out. The most powerful telescope we could ever use already exists.

00:06It doesn't need a lens or a giant glass mirror.

00:09This telescope is 4.5 billion years old, 109 times wider than Earth, and has a diameter of 864,000

00:19miles.

00:19Yep, the Sun itself might become our telescope. And it's totally doable.

00:25Now, the Sun isn't a lens or a mirror like in a regular telescope.

00:29But it's supermassive. And according to Einstein, heavy stuff like that can bend space and time around it.

00:37When light passes close to the Sun, our star's gravity bends it.

00:41And instead of traveling in a straight line, the light curves slightly as it goes by.

00:47Imagine a heavy bowling ball sitting on a stretched sheet. The sheet dips around it.

00:52If you roll a marble nearby, it won't go straight. It will curve toward the dip.

00:57The Sun does the same thing to light. Its huge gravity slightly bends, passing light inward.

01:04And that bent light ends up gathering at a distant point, which is called a focal point.

01:11Astronomers already use this trick, called gravitational lensing, to watch the farthest galaxies in the universe.

01:17When light from a very distant galaxy passes near a huge cluster of galaxies, the cluster's gravity bends and kind

01:25of boosts that light.

01:27It works like a natural cosmic magnifying glass and makes the faraway galaxy look brighter and larger.

01:34This way, we can see much farther than we normally could.

01:38Now, picture this. Light is coming from a planet or star billions of miles away and grazes the Sun as

01:45it passes by.

01:46Thanks to gravity, the Sun bends it.

01:48Now, all we have to do is put a sensor at that focal point and catch the light.

01:53It sounds simple, but there's a problem, like always.

01:58That focal point is about 542 astronomical units from the Sun.

02:04To put that in human terms, that's 542 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, 13 times farther than

02:12Pluto.

02:13And more than 3 times farther than Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object, has been traveling through space since

02:201977.

02:22In other words, sending a spacecraft that far, keeping it alive, and getting it to do its job, isn't a

02:29weekend road trip.

02:31Plus, the focal point isn't a tiny dot.

02:33It's more like a huge lighted patch tens of miles across.

02:37If you park your spacecraft in one spot, you'll only see a tiny slice.

02:43And if you want the whole picture, you'll have to move it across all that gigantic focal area, scanning bit

02:49by bit.

02:50But it's even more difficult than that.

02:53The target you're trying to image, another planet or a distant star, isn't standing still.

02:59By the time your spacecraft reaches the focal area, it can't just aim anywhere and hope for the best.

03:05You have to predict exactly where the target will be, or your telescope will be staring at empty space.

03:11It means that even though the sun's gravity provides us with a cool natural lens, using it is super complicated.

03:20You'll have to deal with huge distances, moving targets, and a focal area bigger than the largest cities on Earth.

03:27But what if we managed to pull it off?

03:30Then we'd be able to see things in the universe with a clarity no other telescope has ever matched.

03:37Now, the crazy part here is that this plan isn't some sci-fi nonsense.

03:42We'd have to send a spacecraft, or maybe a whole swarm of them, three times farther than Voyager.

03:48But after all, that's not hopping to another star system.

03:51This is still inside our solar system.

03:54It's just really far.

03:57One idea experts have entertained for decades is the super-voyager approach.

04:02It goes like this.

04:04You just fling a probe out there, let it zoom through the sun's focal point, collect whatever light it can,

04:10and beam it back.

04:11Great!

04:12But you only get a tiny snapshot of a minuscule patch of your target.

04:17It's not even a full-blown image.

04:19It's like looking at a single pixel of the Mona Lisa and claiming you've seen the entire masterpiece.

04:26What we really need is a spacecraft that can hang out there, move around, and scan the whole focal area,

04:33slowly mapping a target in precise detail.

04:36The latest proposals don't even involve one big spacecraft.

04:39They suggest a swarm of tiny spacecraft, all working together to create a full picture.

04:46They could be like a team of painters working on a huge wall.

04:50But that's not easy.

04:52Tiny spacecrafts still need instruments, power, and fuel.

04:56This will make them bigger and heavier.

04:58It kind of defeats the whole point of having tiny ships.

05:02Then, how about solar sails?

05:05The idea is really cool.

05:06We could launch the swarm from Earth, let them travel toward the sun, unfurl their sails,

05:12and let solar radiation pressure, which is basically sunlight, push them like cosmic sailboats.

05:18They would accelerate insanely fast and reach 542 AU in a few decades, which is pretty long, but not impossible.

05:27After arriving at their destination, they'd carefully move in formation across the huge focal plane,

05:34each one collecting its own slice of light.

05:36Then, they'd beam all that data back to Earth, helping us build the whole picture,

05:42using the sun as the most epic telescope ever.

05:46What could we get with this crazy setup?

05:48Well, point it at Proxima b, the nearest exoplanet, and you could see an almost one-mile resolution.

05:56Compare that to the next-gen space telescopes, where the whole planet is just a few blurry pixels.

06:02You could see mountains, oceans, maybe even continents of any planet within 100 light-years.

06:09Imagine everything else we could observe.

06:12No wonder that a lot of research has gone into this, but there's still a huge gap in our capabilities.

06:18Right now, we don't have solar sails that are powerful and efficient enough,

06:23and we certainly don't have swarms of spacecraft that can coordinate and operate together at that distance.

06:29All the current proposals are impossible at this moment.

06:33They're just beyond today's technology.

06:36But with the right breakthroughs, though, it's entirely feasible.

06:40After all, we already have some incredibly powerful telescopes

06:44that provide us with breathtaking views of the universe.

06:48Like the James Webb Space Telescope.

06:51Such machines are true engineering monsters, billions of dollars, decades of work, and giant mirrors.

06:58For example, James Webb's mirror is 21 feet across

07:02and can resolve details about 600 times sharper than the human eye.

07:08At that resolution, it could read the pattern on a coin from 25 miles away

07:13or see the design on a soccer ball sitting over 340 miles away.

07:21Or take the Hubble Space Telescope.

07:23It detected elements from the early universe,

07:26proved that supermassive black holes existed,

07:29and showed black holes at the heart of galaxies.

07:33It captured the first collision between astronomical objects,

07:37spotted oxygen in a moon's atmosphere,

07:39and even took the first image of a star's surface other than the sun.

07:44It gave us the first visual evidence of planetary building blocks,

07:49first exoplanet atmospheres,

07:51and even found organic molecules in other worlds.

07:54It photographed asteroids with tails,

07:57captured asteroids breaking apart,

08:00and detected water vapor plumes on Europa,

08:03one of Jupiter's largest moons.

08:05Hubble saw the first predicted supernova,

08:08the farthest galaxy and star ever imaged at the time,

08:12and water vapor on an exoplanet in the habitable zone.

08:16It even snapped the first ultraviolet image of a forming exoplanet

08:20and spotted a possible moon orbiting an exoplanet.

08:25Then there's the Event Horizon Telescope,

08:28which isn't just one telescope,

08:30it's a global network.

08:31By sinking instruments around the world,

08:34it gave us mind-blowing images of gas

08:36swirling around black holes.

08:38Its resolution is 20 micro arc seconds,

08:42which means it could spot an orange on the moon.

08:46And still, if we wanted to go even bigger,

08:49we'd need massive dishes or swarms of telescopes

08:52flying through space,

08:53which would be like building a telescope

08:55the size of a small country.

08:58That's why the sun as a telescope is such a great idea.

09:02It already has the mass, the bending power,

09:04and it's sitting there for free.

09:07We just need a camera in the right place

09:09to catch all that light.

09:13That's it for today.

09:14So hey, if you pacified your curiosity,

09:17then give the video a like and share it with your friends.

09:19Or if you want more,

09:20just click on these videos

09:21and stay on the bright side.

09:23And let's jump into these videos.

09:23And let's go to the other side.

09:23There's a smart photo,

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