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
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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
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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