Dec 6, 2018 07:51 PM
(This post was last modified: Dec 6, 2018 07:51 PM by C C.)
http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/20...scope.html
INTRO: What fundamentally limits our ability to see planets, stars, and galaxies through a telescope? To differentiate between one star and a galaxy that contains 100 thousand million stars? “Quantum mechanics,” says Mankei Tsang, a researcher at the National University of Singapore.
This quantum mechanical limit is the subject of two new research efforts that will soon be published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review A—one by Tsang and one by Yale University’s Sisi Zhou and Liang Jiang. Working independently and using different approaches, Tsang and the Yale team reached similar conclusions about what the limit actually is, and both show that we haven’t reached the limit yet. This means that, with clever approaches and state-of-the-art tools, we should be able to create more detailed images of the night sky than ever before.
magine that you’re taking a picture of the sky through a telescope. At a basic level, the image depends on the intensity of light that hits each pixel in the camera’s detector. Even with the best possible camera, our ability to distinguish between two stars or galaxies that appear close together is pretty set by something called the Rayleigh criterion. “Rayleigh’s criterion describes the phenomenon that it is difficult to resolve two optical sources when the distance between their centers is too small, compared to the width of the sources,” explains Zhou.
The good news is: there’s a way around this limit. Two years ago, Tsang and his colleagues Ranjith Nair and Xiao-Ming Lu showed that we can extract even more information from starlight than previously thought, using measurement techniques based on quantum mechanics. With this information, they showed, researchers can differentiate between two stars (or other point sources) so close together that they would normally be indistinguishable, thanks to Rayleigh’s criterion. You can read more about this research in our 2016 post Resolving Starlight with Quantum Technology....
MORE (details): http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/20...scope.html
INTRO: What fundamentally limits our ability to see planets, stars, and galaxies through a telescope? To differentiate between one star and a galaxy that contains 100 thousand million stars? “Quantum mechanics,” says Mankei Tsang, a researcher at the National University of Singapore.
This quantum mechanical limit is the subject of two new research efforts that will soon be published in the American Physical Society’s journal Physical Review A—one by Tsang and one by Yale University’s Sisi Zhou and Liang Jiang. Working independently and using different approaches, Tsang and the Yale team reached similar conclusions about what the limit actually is, and both show that we haven’t reached the limit yet. This means that, with clever approaches and state-of-the-art tools, we should be able to create more detailed images of the night sky than ever before.
magine that you’re taking a picture of the sky through a telescope. At a basic level, the image depends on the intensity of light that hits each pixel in the camera’s detector. Even with the best possible camera, our ability to distinguish between two stars or galaxies that appear close together is pretty set by something called the Rayleigh criterion. “Rayleigh’s criterion describes the phenomenon that it is difficult to resolve two optical sources when the distance between their centers is too small, compared to the width of the sources,” explains Zhou.
The good news is: there’s a way around this limit. Two years ago, Tsang and his colleagues Ranjith Nair and Xiao-Ming Lu showed that we can extract even more information from starlight than previously thought, using measurement techniques based on quantum mechanics. With this information, they showed, researchers can differentiate between two stars (or other point sources) so close together that they would normally be indistinguishable, thanks to Rayleigh’s criterion. You can read more about this research in our 2016 post Resolving Starlight with Quantum Technology....
MORE (details): http://physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com/20...scope.html