A fascinating idea: astronomer Claudio Maccone proposes a...

A fascinating idea: astronomer Claudio Maccone proposes a deep space telescope (a little over 13x the Sun-Pluto distance from here) which would use the Sun’s gravity as a massive gravitational lens to create the most powerful telescope ever built, by far. Such a telescope would allow us to study extrasolar planets with unprecedented detail.

Maccone wants to use the sun as a gravitational lens to make an extraordinarily sensitive radio telescope. He did not invent the idea, which he calls FOCAL, but he has studied it more deeply than anyone else. A radio telescope at a gravitational focal point of the sun would be incredibly sensitive. (Unlike an optical lens, a gravitational lens actually has many focal points that lie along a straight line, called a focal line; imagine a line running through an observer, the center of the lens, and the target.) For one particular frequency that has been proposed as a channel for interstellar communication, a telescope would amplify the signal by a factor of 1.3 quadrillion.

More info at The New Yorker, and at Paul Gilster’s blog Centauri Dreams.