How to make a telescope out of the sun

One of the most exciting aspects of the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is its ability to image and gather information about exoplanets. But while JWST will give us tons of information about these celestial bodies, there’s something that it can’t do: take a high-resolution image of an earth-like exoplanet — specifically, an image where we can clearly see evidence of possible life on another world, such as land masses, clouds, and bodies of water. Slava Turyshev of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on a solution that would give us a clearer picture of an exoplanet. This method would use a phenomenon called gravitational lensing to capture that kind of an image. Gravitational lensing occurs when the gravity of a massive... Continue reading…