Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
scientificamerican.com
Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
1–10 of 38 posts
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#2I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#3I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
The perseverance of scientific obsession must not be underestimated.
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#4I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
There are already some crazy light sources with line width of less than a single Hz (not a typo) https://www.news.ucsb.edu/2019/019332/quiet-light
Still other work to be done, and worrying about what happens in the fibre optics, but it is becoming possible, especially if the coherence does not need to be long lived.
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#5Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#6I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
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Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#7Exoplanet imaging?
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#8I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
They want to store the state of received photons on „quantum harddrives“, transport them to the same place, read the states out and let them interfere locally.
This is the mentioned paper from december 2020 about hour-long optical storage (by Chaun-Feng Li et al.):
https://arxiv.org/abs/2012.14605
(Earlier article from 2015 about this storage technique: https://newatlas.com/quantum-encryption-storage-drive/35553/ )
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#9I sincerely hope that thanks to SpaceX the cost of launching telescopes to space will become small enough to allow multiple space-based telescopes (and radio telescopes). We are obviously some ways from that, but not that far away that we cannot start planning for when it happens.
Re: Quantum astronomy could create telescopes hundreds of kilometers wide
#10I sincerely hope that thanks to SpaceX the cost of launching telescopes to space will become small enough to allow multiple space-based telescopes (and radio telescopes). We are obviously some ways from that, but not that far away that we cannot start planning for when it happens.
Yeah that would be cool, the Hubble telescope has been massively successful but I would have thought there would be much more projects like that. The James Webb one will be next, but I feel like that one's really risky; they took years to develop and build it, and it's going out to a point of space where it's infeasible to send someone up there to fix it if there is a problem.
A ring of radio telescopes in high orbit would be neat.