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Some of the thrilling facets of the James Webb House Telescope (JWST) is its means to image and gather information about exoplanets. However whereas JWST will give us tons of data about these celestial our bodies, there’s one thing that it may’t do: take a high-resolution picture of an earth-like exoplanet — particularly, a picture the place we will clearly see proof of potential life on one other world, comparable to land lots, clouds, and our bodies of water.
Slava Turyshev of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is engaged on an answer that will give us a clearer image of an exoplanet. This technique would use a phenomenon referred to as gravitational lensing to seize that sort of a picture. Gravitational lensing happens when the gravity of an enormous object, like a galaxy or star, bends the space-time round it. This curvature in space-time acts as a lens, inflicting the sunshine from objects which are a lot additional away to bend round it and grow to be magnified. When seen on the proper angle and distance, the magnified mild will seem as a hoop, referred to as an Einstein ring.
Turyshev’s proposed photo voltaic gravitational lens would use the solar as that large object, magnifying the sunshine of a distant exoplanet with the intention to assemble a high-resolution picture we in any other case couldn’t visualize. We sat down with Turyshev to speak about what it might take to achieve this purpose and the way he hopes to attain it inside just some a long time. Watch our video above to see extra.
