Lets Observe Exoplanets With Solar Gravity Lens
Experts are working on a new breakthrough technology to observe exoplanets – so-called solar gravity lens. These could provide astronomers with up to 100 billion times the optical zoom.
As of late, we have found a good number of various exoplanets in nearby space. And these are quite enticing and scientists would like to learn more about them. The problem is that because the planets are much smaller than the stars they orbit around and on top of that much less bright it is quite hard to observe them even with our best equipment.
Now scientists from the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and The Aerospace Corporation are working on a new and amazing technology that could actually provide us with the tools to observe them. And while at the moment everything is still on paper it does look promising. It’s called solar gravity lens that could give astronomers up to 100 billion times zoom. That means if we get them to work we could observe areas the size of New York – the city – on exoplanets.
Gravitational lens work because gravity bend rays of energy (including light) similarly to how regular lens do. And in our solar system, the strong gravitational field is produced by the Sun. So what we would do is to find the spot where rays focus and send probes to those spots.
Sources:
- https://www.space.com/42505-solar-gravity-lens-exoplanets-niac.html
- https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2018_Phase_I_Phase_II/Direct_Multipixel_Imaging_and_Spectroscopy
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