Tau.Neutrino said:
Next Generation Telescopes Could Use “Teleportation” to Take Better Images
Telescopes have come a long way in the past few centuries. From the comparatively modest devices built by astronomers like Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, telescopes have evolved to become massive instruments that require an entire facility to house them and a full crew and network of computers to run them. And in the coming years, much larger observatories will be constructed that can do even more.
more…
From link.
“Interferometry is a process where light is obtained by multiple smaller telescopes and then combined to reconstruct images of what they observed. This process is used by such facilities as the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI) in Chile and the Center for High-Angular Resolution Astronomy (CHARA) in California … One of the drawbacks is that photons are inevitably lost during the transmission process.”
What why how. I hadn’t heard of photons getting lost?
“The standard technique of locally recording the light at each telescope results in too much noise to work for weak light sources. As a result, all current optical telescope arrays work by combining the light from different telescopes directly at a single measurement station. The price to pay is attenuation of the light in transmission to the measurement station. This loss is a severe limitation”
I’m vaguely aware of both methods. Local recording has been used by the first radio interferometers. Combining light at a single measurement station is usually preferred at optical wavelengths. I don’t know how either works in detail but I already know that the light combination can be done either by normal telescope optics or by optical fibre.
I still don’t see why either technique loses photons. I need to look into this some more.