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 away from Earth.

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

More than a century ago, Einstein's theory of relativity told us that the gravity of a massive object can warp space. Stars, for example, bend the path of anything moving near them, including light. This light-bending phenomenon is called "gravitational lensing." It acts like a regular lens or a magnifying glass under the right conditions.

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

NASA scientists want to build a telescope that uses gravitational lensing to take images of exoplanets with a very high resolution of 1,000×1,000 pixels, enough to directly observe any continent on exoplanets hundreds of light-years away. Meanwhile, most current systems rely on just a few pixels to observe distant worlds.

We can’t build it yet because a gravitational lens telescope only works at the Sun’s focal point, which is 14 times farther out in interstellar space than Pluto’s orbit. The Voyager 1 spacecraft, currently the most distant human spacecraft, has traveled only a fifth of the necessary distance in the past 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 more than 50 years to reach the convergence point.

According to VNE