NASA says the telescope can detect 'surface features' and even 'signs of habitability' on distant planets.
The space agency is funding research on a conceptual telescope called a 'solar gravitational lens' (SGL) that could allow us to observe distant exoplanets at amazing resolutions – a futuristic pursuit that could help figure out, once and for all, if we are alone in the universe.
The project received funding under the agency's program Innovative Advanced Concepts, an incubator for radically futuristic concepts.
The idea is to 'directly find a habitable Earth-like planet in our stellar region', according to the project description. In six months of observation, we could get a resolution of about 25 km, 'enough to see surface features and signs of habitability.'
Albert Einstein predicted 84 years ago that the rays of light that go around the edges of the sun converge into a lens at a distance of about 550 astronomical units (about 82 billion kilometers).
Slava Turyshev, a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and lead author of the related study, uploaded to the arXiv preprint archive in February, suggests that this phenomenon could allow us to obtain startlingly detailed images of distant Earth-like planets.
“In the region of strong SGL interference, this light is greatly amplified, forming an Einstein ring around the Sun, representing a distorted image of a distant source,” the article says.
The image even shows what a close-up of an exoplanet might look like when using SGL.
But there is a significant obstacle that we must overcome. We would have to send a 'solar coronagraph telescope' a great distance from the Sun. By comparison, Voyager I is currently only 123 astronomical units from Earth – the farthest man-made object ever sent.
Sources: Photo: NASA / Slava Turyshev
