Tau.Neutrino said:
A new quantum technique could enable telescopes the size of planet Earth
There’s a revolution underway in astronomy. In fact, you might say there are several. In the past 10 years, exoplanet studies have advanced considerably, gravitational wave astronomy has emerged as a new field, and the first images of supermassive black holes (SMBHs) have been captured. A related field, interferometry, has also advanced incredibly thanks to highly sensitive instruments and the ability to share and combine data from observatories worldwide. In particular, the science of very-long baseline interferometry (VLBI) is opening entirely new realms of possibility.
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In Radio wave frequencies, we’ve already had the “Whole Earth Telescope”, a telescope the size of planet Earth.
And there have been proposals (eg. by me) to make it even larger.
But this new idea is in the optical range.
Come to think of it, how big will LISA be? LISA will be a space-based optical interferometer. 2.5 million km long. That’s 200 times as big as the Earth.
> According to a recent study by researchers from Australia and Singapore, a new quantum technique could enhance optical VLBI. It’s known as Stimulated Raman Adiabatic Passage (STIRAP), which allows quantum information to be transferred without losses. When imprinted into a quantum error correction code, this technique could allow for VLBI observations into previously inaccessible wavelengths.
Nice.
> To realize optical interferometry, you need all parts of the interferometer to be stable to within a fraction of a wavelength of light, so the light can interfere. This is very hard to do over large distances
Exceedingly difficult. A gravitational wave detector interferometer needs stability at least 1000 times better than that, but it only needs to take a single value not an image.
I can’t judge how good this proposal is without further digging into the details.