What Comes After LUVOIR? Three Extreme Ideas For Space Telescopes

while we're all waiting for James Webb to launch which it will the extremely large telescope to be constructed and Louvre our to get approved please get approved please get approved we're all gonna need a way to pass the time so let's have our imaginations take flight out into the universe and consider some of the most incredible ideas suggested for telescopes unless you've been crawling through scientific journals like me I guarantee you've never heard of any of them but when I'm done you're gonna want to fund all of them okay let's get into it and start talking about an idea that you're probably familiar with but put it on the moon the overwhelmingly large telescope Moon Edition people always ask me why nobody is planning to build a telescope on the moon and obviously that's because getting to the moon is incredibly hazardous complicated and expensive the best effort of the United States was to get 12 men down to the surface and they were able to bring home a few hundred kilograms of space rocks but what if we had a serious presence on the moon with SpaceX starships flitting back and forth between our worlds and someone wanted to put up a serious telescope on the moon what's possible okay fine here's what's possible according to gene schneider joseph silk and frog for kelly called owl moon very high-resolution spectra polarimetric interferometry and imaging from the moon first a little background the largest ground telescope under construction is the European extremely large telescope which will measure 39 metres across more than triple the size of the largest operational telescope right now and when it's completed in 2026 the ELT will have the capability of directly observing planets orbiting other stars but there was another idea in the works called the overwhelmingly large telescope which would aim to build the largest possible earth-based telescope with an aperture of 100 metres across this telescope would have the capability of studying the atmospheres of earth sized planets orbiting other stars but when the cost estimates reached more than a billion dollars a billion dollars Europe decided to build the extremely large tell nope instead nobody wants to put a billion dollars into a telescope yes I'm aware of James Webb's budget so the plan for al moon is to put the overwhelmingly large telescope on the moon what could you do with a telescope that big in a place that has no atmosphere al moon could directly observe earth sized worlds orbiting other stars and map out their continents they could study the atmospheres of other worlds and search for bio signatures with a high degree of precision it could get this watch the silhouettes of planets as they transit in front of their stars and measure the heights of their mountains it could look at planets and detect the glint of light off their oceans and then of course you could use it for anything else you'd want to study with a 100 metre Space Telescope newly forming planetary systems the accretion disks around black holes and peer right out to the very edge of the observable universe and see the first stars forming for all you David kipping fans Owl Moon could serve as a detector for a tera scope using the atmosphere of the earth as another lens to see the universe with even more precision there's another advantage by having a telescope on the moon and other telescopes here on earth you could have them act together as a single telescope with a baseline of 380,000 kilometers on average now it's not as good as a telescope that big but with modern techniques and a lot of computing power it could be possible to resolve the surface of the Pulsar at the heart of the Crab Nebula or see the surface of white dwarf Sirius be the challenge of building a gigantic telescope on the moon of course is building a gigantic telescope on the moon right now it costs about $100,000 per kilogram to launch material to the moon so clearly a lot of it would need to be built out of local materials which is abundant on the moon but engineers would need to develop optical surfaces that don't require polishing and could be 3d printed right on site Europe is already planning a lunar village which could begin construction in the 2035 to 2050 timeframe Antarctica is another place that's remote complicated and difficult for humans to survive but once there were permanently inhabited research stations of the South Pole the telescope soon followed when the lunar village gets set up we could see smaller 1 to 8 meter telescopes followed eventually by the monster lunar scopes next up let's consider the Nautilus proposed by Donna lop ie Tom mill ster and others called a thousand Earth's a very large aperture ultralight Space Telescope array for atmosphere bio signature surveys I have liked every part of that title their goal is to create a space telescope capable of finding life on other worlds an observatory that can scan the atmospheres of 1000 like worlds in the habitable zones of their stars within a radius of 1,000 light-years considering the fact that there are new observatories today that can do this even James Webb or leVoir won't be able to scan exoplanet atmospheres at this industrial scale it's going to take an enormous Space Telescope but instead of a single expensive Space Telescope Nautilus would consist of 35 14 meter wide spherical telescopes each one of these instruments would be more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope but they use a special kind of lens that's perfect for studying the atmosphere of a transiting exoplanet but not great for general Astronomy purposes the lens is called a multi order diffractive engineered material lens technology or mode they're lighter and less dense than traditional telescope mirrors and work through diffraction as light changes directions best example is something like this is a Fresnel lens which is flat but can still provide magnification the telescopes would be constructed on the ground and then stacked up inside their rocket in a compact configuration that fits within a rocket fairing 15 Nautilus units could be stacked up inside a spacex starship launch fairing like a roll of coins then they launch to their ideal orbit probably the Earth Sun l2 Lagrange point you know that spot that keeps the Sun Earth and Moon in the same spot in the sky the telescope's would deploy and inflate into spheres with these unique mode lenses and here's the key they don't need to fly in a specific careful formation they don't even need to be close together they can drift closer and farther each other it really doesn't matter they're not using interferometry to combine their light they're just collecting the light that falls on their separate instruments merging that together as if it was a single telescope with the total surface area of all the separate lenses they'd act like a single telescope the equivalent of a 50 metre space telescope this would be one to two orders of magnitude more powerful than leVoir at a reasonable price and it can be scaled up just launched more space balloons I'll put a link to the original paper in the show notes so you can read it at your leisure it goes into great detail and there's some math but it's highly readable and I think you'll enjoy it too telescopes down but I promise you a third how about a telescope that's more than a hundred kilometres across and we'll get to that in a second but first I'd like to thank sergeant prison phil kerr jan josh süßer and the rest of our 827 patrons for their generous support educational content should be freely available to anyone in the world and the patrons make this possible join our community at patreon.com slash universe today and get in on the action the French astronomer Antoine labarie has been advocating for decades for the plan of building a hyper telescope a gigantic Space Telescope made of smaller individual observatories that fly in formation consider the event horizon telescope which used the technique of interferometry to create a virtual radio telescope the size of planet Earth and captured images of the event horizons around various black holes like m87 if you can separate the telescope's but still align the receivers to the point that they're observing the same photon wave fronts you can have a telescope the size of the earth this is called interferometry and it allows you to resolve objects that you wouldn't normally see you can't see faint objects as well but the resolution is really helpful for bright objects interferometry and radio waves is tricky but possible here on earth as long as you've got your clocks perfectly calibrated and you've got an enormous amount of computer power interferometry in the infrared and visible spectrum is much trickier because the wavelength of the photons are so small the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope is an interferometer using the combined light and baseline from four separate telescopes to act like a single telescope but it does it with a lot of lasers but what if you could fly your separate telescope in space where you could align them perfectly to do interferometry without atmospheric turbulence wind weather wildlife and earthquakes the baby proposes a flotilla of tiny optical telescopes just a few centimeters across and arrange them into a gigantic sphere which then communicates to a larger focal combiner to receive the signals and send them home to earth in proposal to NASA in 2008 the team suggested a starting size of one kilometer which would be made up of a hundred light collectors each of which is 25 centimeters across for about 10 inches at this point it would have the same ability as Hubble to see fainter objects but with much higher resolution but follow-on missions could expand the number of spacecraft in the array to over a thousand as well as expand the wavelengths farther into the infrared in ultraviolet if the sphere provided a 100 kilometer diameter they would be capable of providing images of the surface of an exoplanet 10 light-years away from Earth astronomers would be able to separate the oceans and continents and even see different vegetation zones and they've proposed a version that would be more than 100 thousand kilometres across that could image the surface of neutron stars see the region around the Milky Way's supermassive black hole in unprecedented detail it would directly image the first galaxies that formed in the universe it could detect rogue planets and black holes as they pass in front of stars in front of other galaxies one advantage of the strategy is that you can start small the technique would be viable with just 12 collectors and a focal combiner spacecraft but then you can launch more collectors and more focal combiners creating larger and larger telescopes the array would be launched to the Sun earth l2 Lagrange point now because the light pressure from the Sun will be constantly pushing on the light weight telescopes they would actually be positioned a little closer to the Sun so that then they'd be in balance micro thrusters might be needed to keep them aligned and if they run out of fuel then you just send more collectors if they get knocked out by cosmic rays or micrometeorites you send more collectors the cheap and easy to replace but an even bolder ideas to use lasers to keep the telescope's aligned an infrared laser could push the collectors around and then trap them in a parabola with an accuracy of about one micron of all the ideas in this video the hyper telescope is actually the farthest along libary and his team are working on a ground-based version in the southern French Alps it's built into a valley with dozens of collector mirrors focusing their light on a focal camera that's suspended above and if these tests are successful we could see prototype versions fly next new technologies lower launch costs reusable rockets the next next generation of enormous space telescopes could be right around the corner what do you think which of these three telescope ideas do you like the best let me know your thoughts in the comments here are the names of the patrons who support us at the $10 level and more want to see your name here and support the work we do go to patreon.com such a universe today once a week I gather up all my space news into a single email newsletter and I send it out it's got pictures brief highlights about the story and links you can find out more go to universe today to calm such newsletter to sign up did you know that all of my videos are also available in a handy audio podcast format so you can have the latest episodes as well as special bonus materials like interviews with me show up right on your audio device go to Universe Today that calm such audio or search for Universe Today on iTunes Spotify or wherever get your podcasts I'll put a link in the show notes interested in the next generation of super telescopes here's a video that we did first on all of the ground super telescopes and then all the space super telescopes watch it now

Channel: Fraser Cain

Views: 36,679

Rating: 4.9415207 out of 5

Keywords: universe today, fraser cain, space, astronomy, space telescopes, owl-moon, overwhelmingly large telescope, very large telescope, interferometry, the moon, exoplanets, spacex starship, terrascope, lunar village, nautilus telescope, biosignatures, multiorder diffractive engineered material lens, luvoir, hypertelescope, antoine labeyrie

Id: rIeiz5X4rrw

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 11 2019