What diameter of telescope – or length (“baseline”) of an interferometric array of telescopes (as discussed in class) – would be required to resolve the disk of the super-Earth Gliese 581c , assuming it has the same diameter as Earth and that you"d want the image to have at least 10 pixels across the diameter of the disk of the planet (like the image of the child"s face at right in the picture on the previous page)? Express your answer in metres. How does this compare with the largest optical telescopes or arrays in existence today? (You"d need an even longer baseline to distinguish basic features like continents if they are similar in size to those on Earth.)
please help me with Astronomy/Physics?
- Thread starter Tim Li
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