David Kipping

We've proposed in my team actually that the Sun is the ultimate pinnacle of telescope design, but flying to 1,000 AU is a real pain in the butt because it's just going to take so long.

And so a more practical way of achieving this might be to use the Earth.

Now, the Earth doesn't have anywhere near enough gravity to create a substantial gravitational lens, but it has an atmosphere.

And that atmosphere refracts light, it bends light.

So whenever you see a sunset, just as the Sun is setting below the horizon,

it's actually already beneath the horizon.

It's just that the light is bending through the atmosphere.

It's actually already about half a degree down beneath.

And what you're seeing is that curvature of the light path.

And your brain interprets it, of course, to be following a straight line because your brain always thinks that.

And so you can use that bending.

Whenever you have bending, you have a telescope.

And so we've proposed to my team that you could use this refraction to similarly create an Earth-sized telescope.

Called the Terrascope.

The Terrascope, yeah.

We have a great video on this.

Do you have a paper on the Terrascope?

I do, yeah.

Great.

Sometimes I get confused with this because I've heard of an Earth-sized telescope, because you may have heard of the Event Horizon Telescope, which took an image of the center of our black hole.