Most Exciting NIAC Project, Grains of Sand vs Stars, Total Solar Eclipse Going Away | Q&A 295
Which NIAC project would be the best to bring to life? Are there really more stars than grains of sand on Earth? Is the solar eclipse going away from us? What's on my shelf behind me? Answering all these questions and more in this Q&A.
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Comments (8)
Getting a telescope positioned 550 AU from the sun is not a small ask! Not only do you have to get it there, you have to stop it once it gets there. 51,130,000,000 miles. How long would that take using existing rocket technology? FYI, as of the most recent data, Voyager 1 is approximately 167.34 Astronomical Units (AU) away from Earth.
The star shades I’ve seen seem quite large. How far from the telescope do they need to be to only cover the star and why can’t they be smaller. Is I to do with wavelength of light going through the spokes.
More stars in the universe than sands on the beaches of Earth but not all the sand on Earth….but what if the Universe is infinite? Or are we talking the visible universe?
Just the visible Universe. If the Universe is infinite, then it's an infinite number of stars.
I can't understand how gravitational lenses will show tiny details on exoplanets. The lens images so far show distant things smeared out into a ring, losing all the detail. Do we already have any examples of lenses showing fine detail on a distant object, not just making it brighter ? Thanks.
Nope, they make the lensed object blurry. And you can't easily undo the distortion if you don't know the precise shape of the blobby galaxy cluster acting as a lens. But you can do spectroscopy on the lensed galaxy to see what it's made of.
The question about eclipses also suggested the sun is getting smaller, but actually it is getting larger so making the last total eclipse come sooner.
Yes, helium is building up in the core so the shell where hydrogen fusion can occur is growing and the sun is getting hotter and expanding. The Earth will be uninhabitable long before the red giant phase.