00:00So check this out. The most powerful telescope we could ever use already exists.
00:06It doesn't need a lens or a giant glass mirror.
00:09This telescope is 4.5 billion years old, 109 times wider than Earth, and has a diameter of 864,000
00:19miles.
00:19Yep, the Sun itself might become our telescope. And it's totally doable.
00:25Now, the Sun isn't a lens or a mirror like in a regular telescope.
00:29But it's supermassive. And according to Einstein, heavy stuff like that can bend space and time around it.
00:37When light passes close to the Sun, our star's gravity bends it.
00:41And instead of traveling in a straight line, the light curves slightly as it goes by.
00:47Imagine a heavy bowling ball sitting on a stretched sheet. The sheet dips around it.
00:52If you roll a marble nearby, it won't go straight. It will curve toward the dip.
00:57The Sun does the same thing to light. Its huge gravity slightly bends, passing light inward.
01:04And that bent light ends up gathering at a distant point, which is called a focal point.
01:11Astronomers already use this trick, called gravitational lensing, to watch the farthest galaxies in the universe.
01:17When light from a very distant galaxy passes near a huge cluster of galaxies, the cluster's gravity bends and kind
01:25of boosts that light.
01:27It works like a natural cosmic magnifying glass and makes the faraway galaxy look brighter and larger.
01:34This way, we can see much farther than we normally could.
01:38Now, picture this. Light is coming from a planet or star billions of miles away and grazes the Sun as
01:45it passes by.
01:46Thanks to gravity, the Sun bends it.
01:48Now, all we have to do is put a sensor at that focal point and catch the light.
01:53It sounds simple, but there's a problem, like always.
01:58That focal point is about 542 astronomical units from the Sun.
02:04To put that in human terms, that's 542 times the distance from Earth to the Sun, 13 times farther than
02:12Pluto.
02:13And more than 3 times farther than Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object, has been traveling through space since
02:201977.
02:22In other words, sending a spacecraft that far, keeping it alive, and getting it to do its job, isn't a
02:29weekend road trip.
02:31Plus, the focal point isn't a tiny dot.
02:33It's more like a huge lighted patch tens of miles across.
02:37If you park your spacecraft in one spot, you'll only see a tiny slice.
02:43And if you want the whole picture, you'll have to move it across all that gigantic focal area, scanning bit
02:49by bit.
02:50But it's even more difficult than that.
02:53The target you're trying to image, another planet or a distant star, isn't standing still.
02:59By the time your spacecraft reaches the focal area, it can't just aim anywhere and hope for the best.
03:05You have to predict exactly where the target will be, or your telescope will be staring at empty space.
03:11It means that even though the sun's gravity provides us with a cool natural lens, using it is super complicated.
03:20You'll have to deal with huge distances, moving targets, and a focal area bigger than the largest cities on Earth.
03:27But what if we managed to pull it off?
03:30Then we'd be able to see things in the universe with a clarity no other telescope has ever matched.
03:37Now, the crazy part here is that this plan isn't some sci-fi nonsense.
03:42We'd have to send a spacecraft, or maybe a whole swarm of them, three times farther than Voyager.
03:48But after all, that's not hopping to another star system.
03:51This is still inside our solar system.
03:54It's just really far.
03:57One idea experts have entertained for decades is the super-voyager approach.
04:02It goes like this.
04:04You just fling a probe out there, let it zoom through the sun's focal point, collect whatever light it can,
04:10and beam it back.
04:11Great!
04:12But you only get a tiny snapshot of a minuscule patch of your target.
04:17It's not even a full-blown image.
04:19It's like looking at a single pixel of the Mona Lisa and claiming you've seen the entire masterpiece.
04:26What we really need is a spacecraft that can hang out there, move around, and scan the whole focal area,
04:33slowly mapping a target in precise detail.
04:36The latest proposals don't even involve one big spacecraft.
04:39They suggest a swarm of tiny spacecraft, all working together to create a full picture.
04:46They could be like a team of painters working on a huge wall.
04:50But that's not easy.
04:52Tiny spacecrafts still need instruments, power, and fuel.
04:56This will make them bigger and heavier.
04:58It kind of defeats the whole point of having tiny ships.
05:02Then, how about solar sails?
05:05The idea is really cool.
05:06We could launch the swarm from Earth, let them travel toward the sun, unfurl their sails,
05:12and let solar radiation pressure, which is basically sunlight, push them like cosmic sailboats.
05:18They would accelerate insanely fast and reach 542 AU in a few decades, which is pretty long, but not impossible.
05:27After arriving at their destination, they'd carefully move in formation across the huge focal plane,
05:34each one collecting its own slice of light.
05:36Then, they'd beam all that data back to Earth, helping us build the whole picture,
05:42using the sun as the most epic telescope ever.
05:46What could we get with this crazy setup?
05:48Well, point it at Proxima b, the nearest exoplanet, and you could see an almost one-mile resolution.
05:56Compare that to the next-gen space telescopes, where the whole planet is just a few blurry pixels.
06:02You could see mountains, oceans, maybe even continents of any planet within 100 light-years.
06:09Imagine everything else we could observe.
06:12No wonder that a lot of research has gone into this, but there's still a huge gap in our capabilities.
06:18Right now, we don't have solar sails that are powerful and efficient enough,
06:23and we certainly don't have swarms of spacecraft that can coordinate and operate together at that distance.
06:29All the current proposals are impossible at this moment.
06:33They're just beyond today's technology.
06:36But with the right breakthroughs, though, it's entirely feasible.
06:40After all, we already have some incredibly powerful telescopes
06:44that provide us with breathtaking views of the universe.
06:48Like the James Webb Space Telescope.
06:51Such machines are true engineering monsters, billions of dollars, decades of work, and giant mirrors.
06:58For example, James Webb's mirror is 21 feet across
07:02and can resolve details about 600 times sharper than the human eye.
07:08At that resolution, it could read the pattern on a coin from 25 miles away
07:13or see the design on a soccer ball sitting over 340 miles away.
07:21Or take the Hubble Space Telescope.
07:23It detected elements from the early universe,
07:26proved that supermassive black holes existed,
07:29and showed black holes at the heart of galaxies.
07:33It captured the first collision between astronomical objects,
07:37spotted oxygen in a moon's atmosphere,
07:39and even took the first image of a star's surface other than the sun.
07:44It gave us the first visual evidence of planetary building blocks,
07:49first exoplanet atmospheres,
07:51and even found organic molecules in other worlds.
07:54It photographed asteroids with tails,
07:57captured asteroids breaking apart,
08:00and detected water vapor plumes on Europa,
08:03one of Jupiter's largest moons.
08:05Hubble saw the first predicted supernova,
08:08the farthest galaxy and star ever imaged at the time,
08:12and water vapor on an exoplanet in the habitable zone.
08:16It even snapped the first ultraviolet image of a forming exoplanet
08:20and spotted a possible moon orbiting an exoplanet.
08:25Then there's the Event Horizon Telescope,
08:28which isn't just one telescope,
08:30it's a global network.
08:31By sinking instruments around the world,
08:34it gave us mind-blowing images of gas
08:36swirling around black holes.
08:38Its resolution is 20 micro arc seconds,
08:42which means it could spot an orange on the moon.
08:46And still, if we wanted to go even bigger,
08:49we'd need massive dishes or swarms of telescopes
08:52flying through space,
08:53which would be like building a telescope
08:55the size of a small country.
08:58That's why the sun as a telescope is such a great idea.
09:02It already has the mass, the bending power,
09:04and it's sitting there for free.
09:07We just need a camera in the right place
09:09to catch all that light.
09:13That's it for today.
09:14So hey, if you pacified your curiosity,
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09:23There's a smart photo,
