Astronomers plan to use the sun's gravity to study exoplanetary bodies.
Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerospace Corporation are exploring a groundbreaking concept for observing exoplanets. It is based on a solar gravity lens (SGL).
The gravitational lens created by the Sun will provide 100 billionth signal amplification, which in turn will allow details up to 10 kilometers across to be seen. The members of the research team argue that this is like looking at something the size of New York on an exoplanet.
According to a press release from the Aerospace Corporation, according to Einstein's Theory of Relativity, light traveling through space will bend when passing near sufficiently massive objects. This means that light coming from afar will bend around the sun's disk and eventually converge in the focal region as if it had passed through a lens.
SGL concept as interpreted by the artist.
“The solar gravitational lens requires a network of sensors to be placed that will observe light from exoplanets as soon as they reach a distance of about 50 billion miles - or 550 astronomical units (AU) from Earth,” says co-author Tom Heinsheimer. "To reach this solar gravity line, a swarm of spacecraft will have to use solar sails to fly out of the solar system at speeds over 75 miles per second (over 120 kilometers per second. - Author's note)."
Navigation and acceleration technologies must keep the spacecraft's sensors on a 1.6-kilometer-wide line that contains light from the exoplanet. Feedback of six light days would be impractical, so spacecraft must be adaptable and capable of learning.
For the two-year study of SGL, the Aerospace Corporation received $ 130,000 during the second phase of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program under a contract with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Promotional video:
More about the SGL idea can be found on the NASA NIAC website.
Vladimir Guillen