Mission to reach and operate at the focal region of the solar gravitational lens

• celestiary

  4 42 8.0 JavaScript

  Astronomical simulator of solar system and local stars

  

hmm.. right.. if the angle of deflection is low and the star is close enough that its light and deflected light show up very close together. My intuition is this is not the case... remember Eddington's test of relativity was for deflection of starlight around our Sun. We're really close, yet it was observable with the moon obscuring the main sunlight.

the article[1] says "For light grazing the surface of the sun, the approximate angular deflection is roughly 1.75 arcseconds." So, what, we take the arcsin of 1.75 arcseconds to get the apparent divergence ratio, and multiply that by distance to stars? As long as that value is larger than the aperture of your camera, then you don't get competing light? Or maybe you'd need something like the TESS satellite, where you have a screen specially created to only allow certain beam transits into your detector.

I've worked with a nearest 10k stars database (https://celestiary.github.io/#sun) and the edge of that is about 2k light years away. So very roughly, let's say there's 1/8th of those in a certain direction... so you get.. what? some 2k sample points towards some distant object? But really most of them wouldn't deflect that object's light towards Earth, but usually over or undershoot.

Don't really know how to put these together quickly, but is giving me some good food for thought!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddington_experiment

• mglt

  1 3 0.0 JavaScript

  Exploration of the idea of a Multiple Gravitational Lens Telescope

  

Heya, I'm really inspired by the idea. I propose we work it up into a paper, On the Existence (or not) of a Multiple Gravitational Lens Telescope.

I've created a project under Celestiary since I think we can use the code there to do the search on the Celestia star database and also do simulations.

https://github.com/celestiary/mglt

I hope that's interesting and that we can work together!

Cheers,

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