NASA plans to turn the Sun into a giant telescope.

NASA wants to use the Sun as a giant telescope to observe high-quality images of exoplanets hundreds of light-years from Earth.

A team of scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) wants to use the Sun's gravitational pull as a giant magnifying glass to observe exoplanets outside our solar system, according toPopular MechanicsTheir ideas were presented at the Planet Blue Science Vision 2050 conference held in Washington DC, USA, on February 27-28 and March 1.

Over a century ago, Einstein's theory of relativity told us that the gravity of a large object can bend space. For example, stars bend the path of anything moving near them, including light. This bending of light is called "gravitational lensing." It acts like a regular lens or a magnifying glass under certain conditions.

The Sun's gravitational pull can be used as a giant magnifying glass. Photo: Claudio Maccone.

NASA scientists want to build a telescope that uses the gravitational lensing effect to capture images of exoplanets at a very high resolution of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels, enough to directly observe any continent on exoplanets hundreds of light-years from Earth. Meanwhile, most current systems rely on only a few pixels to observe these distant worlds.

We can't build this telescope yet because a gravitational lensing telescope only works at the Sun's focal point, which is in interstellar space 14 times farther from Pluto's orbit. Voyager 1, humanity's farthest-traveling spacecraft to date, has only covered one-fifth of the distance required in the last half-century.

Theoretically, launching a spacecraft using modern propulsion technology could catch up with Voyager in just over a decade. But it would still take over 50 years to reach the convergence point.

According to VNE