David Kipping

And it's very impressive, and it previously did Messier 87, a nearby supermassive black hole.

And so those images were interferometric.

So they were small telescopes scattered across the Earth, and they combined the light paths together interferometrically to create effectively an Earth-sized telescope.

angular resolution.

Telescopes always have two properties.

There's the angular resolution, which is how small of a thing you can see on the surface, and then there's the magnification.

How much brighter does that object get versus just your eye or some small object.

Now, what

what the Event Horizon Telescope did, it traded off amplification or magnification for the angular resolution.

That's what it wanted.

It wanted that high angular resolution, but it doesn't really have much photon collecting power because each telescope individually is very small.

The telescope is different because it is literally collecting light with a light bucket, which is essentially the size of the Earth.

And so that gives you both benefits potentially.

Not only the high angular resolution,

that a large aperture promises you, but also actually physically collects all those photons so you can detect light from very, very far away, the very outer edges of the universe.

And so we proposed this as a possible future technological way of achieving these extreme goals, ambitious goals we have in astronomy.

But it's a very difficult system to test because you essentially have to fly out to these focus points, and these focus points lie beyond the Moon.

So you have to have someone who is willing to fly beyond the Moon and hitchhike an experimental telescope onto it and do that cheaply.

If it was something doing low Earth orbit, it'd be easy.

You could just attach a CubeSat to the next Falcon 9 rocket or something and test it out.