David Kipping

going beyond that, maybe in our lifetimes, towards the end of our lifetimes perhaps.

I think it's technically possible, as Breakthrough Starshot are giving us a lot of encouragement with, to maybe send a small probe to the nearest stars and start actually taking high-resolution images of these objects.

There's only so much you can do from far away.

And we can see it in the solar system.

I mean, there's only so much you can learn about Europa by pointing Hubble Space Telescope at it.

But if you really want to understand that moon, you're going to have to send something to orbit it to hopefully land on it and drill down to the surface.

And so the idea of even taking a flyby and doing a snapshot photo that gets beamed back, that doesn't even have to be more than 100 pixels by 100 pixels, even that would be a completely game-changing capability to be able to truly image these objects.

And maybe at home in our own solar system, we can certainly get to a point where we produce crude maps of exoplanets.

The ultimate limit of what a telescope could do is governed by its size.

And so the largest telescope you could probably ever build would be one that was the size of the Sun.

There's a clever trick for doing this without physically building a telescope that's the size of the sun, and that's to use the sun as a gravitational lens.

This was proposed, I think, by Von Eschlerman in 1979, but it builds upon Einstein's theory of general relativity, of course, that there is a warping of light, a bending of light from the sun's gravitational field.

And so a distant starlight, it's like a magnifying glass.

Anything that bends light basically can be used as a telescope.

It's gonna bend light to a point.

Now, it turns out the Sun's gravity is not strong enough to create a particularly great telescope here because the focus point is really out in the Kuiper Belt.

It's at 550 astronomical units away from the Earth, so 550 times further away from the Sun than we are.

And that's beyond any of our spacecraft have ever gone.

So you have to send a spacecraft to that distance, which would take...

30, 40 years, even optimistically improving our chemical propulsion system significantly.