While that works for longer wavelength (Radio Astronomy), and that has allowed researchers to get that incredible image of the black hole, the technology to do that on a large scale for optical wavelengths is not there... though that is something being worked on for smaller arrays.
WAY back in the early 2000's I worked on a laser guide star for the Keck observatory in Hawaii...
Adaptive optics allows ground based telescopes to operate near their diffraction limit, but with some pretty important caveats...
FIRST you need a bright 'reference star' to be very near (within a few arcseconds) the target you want to observe... you measure the light from the reference star and see how the atmosphere has distorted it, and then you apply a complementary distortion to a deformable mirror to undo that distortion. (When I say a 'bright reference star' 'bright' is brighter than around 10th or 11th magnitude) This limits you to maybe ~1% of the sky if you are only using natural stars.
SECOND you can only really correct in the infrared wavelengths- the reasons for this are complicated and would take a lot of writing to cover, but it boils down to this: The atmospheric turbulence impacts shorter wavelengths more, if you want your adaptive optics system to correct the light at shorter wavelengths then you need to have a brighter reference star.... Stars bright enough to allow correction at visible wavelengths are so few that its not worth the trouble...
The laser guide star let us get around the first restriction, allowing us to create an artificial star anywhere we want in the sky to use as a reference, but it did nothing to get us around the second restriction.... the laser guide star works by making the sodium atoms in the upper atmosphere glow where the beam hits them, but the resulting star if faint- at BEST 8th magnitude, more typically 10th. There are only so many sodium atoms up there, so turning the laser power up wont make the 'star' any brighter. So the 10 meter diameter Keck telescope, with the laser guide star, could have better resolution than the Hubble - but only in the infrared- In the visible wavelengths Hubble was the champion.
By losing out on the visible portion of the spectrum you are not just losing out on the information that might be contained in those wavelengths, you are also losing out on the resolution you could have with shorter wavelengths. The resolution of a telescope (in Radians) is proportional to the wavelength divided by the telescope diameter. The smaller the wavelength, the smaller the features a given telescope can resolve. A 10meter diffraction limited telescope at 500nm wavelength has 6 times better resolution than one viewing at a wavelength of 3000nm.
If you could create BRIGHT guide stars in the sky (and here I am talking comparable to the brightest stars in the sky- 0th-2nd magnitude) where you wanted, then you could do adaptive optics compensation at much shorter wavelengths... and that capability is exactly what is being worked on now. It does not take a very powerful laser in space to create a 'star' as viewed from the ground that is as bright as the brightest star in the sky even at a distance of 200,000 km...
Who knows when or if we will ever be able to build a 30m or 100m diameter space telescope, but astronomers are currently building 30m telescopes on the ground with planning underway for even larger... if they could operate at their true diffraction limit AND DO SO AT SHORT WAVELENGTHS then the resolution they would have would be revolutionary.
Space telescopes will still have some advantages, of course... so they will play a valuable role in astronomy, but getting the diffraction limit with huge ground telescopes will lead to incredible advances!
Space/Science » in reply to Does it have anything to do with global arrays? n/t
No...
The whole thread (17 posts)
- Back to settle an argument: The size of the Universe
- Maybe its a moot point.
- Space itself is expanding....
- There are some things Man was not meant to know...
