By 
May 9th, 2022
Credit: Alexander Madurowicz/Bruce Macintosh
A futuristic technique could enable astronomical imaging far more advanced than any present today to image exoplanets.
Stanford scientists have proposed a gravity telescope.
The concept proposes positioning a telescope, the Sun, and exoplanet in a line with the Sun in the middle. Doing so, scientists could use the gravitational field of the sun to magnify light from the exoplanet as it passes by.
As opposed to a magnifying glass which has a curved surface that bends light, a gravitational lens has a curved space-time that enables imaging far away objects.
Solar gravitational lensing
In a paper published on May 2 in The Astrophysical Journal – “Integral Field Spectroscopy with the Solar Gravitational Lens” — the researchers describe a way to manipulate solar gravitational lensing to view planets outside our solar system.
“We want to take pictures of planets that are orbiting other stars that are as good as the pictures we can make of planets in our own solar system,” said Bruce Macintosh, a physics professor at in the School of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford and deputy director of the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC).
Credit: Alexander Madurowicz/Bruce Macintosh
“With this technology, we hope to take a picture of a planet 100 light-years away that has the same impact as Apollo 8’s picture of Earth,” Macintosh adds.
“The solar gravitational lens opens up an entirely new window for observation,” said Alexander Madurowicz, a PhD student at KIPAC. “This will allow investigation of the detailed dynamics of the planet atmospheres, as well as the distributions of clouds and surface features, which we have no way to investigate now.”
To access the research paper, go to:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/ac5e9d/pdf
Also, go to this Stanford University story that details the concept at:
https://news.stanford.edu/2022/05/02/gravity-telescope-image-exoplanets/
Posted in Space News
