I shudder to think of the difficulty in maintaining phase coherence at optical wavelengths for the baselines they mention in this article.
I sincerely hope that thanks to SpaceX the cost of launching telescopes to space will become small enough to allow multiple space-based telescopes (and radio telescopes). We are obviously some ways from that, but not that far away that we cannot start planning for when it happens.
I wonder what would it take to send a pair of optical telescopes on lunar landers (unmanned?) and attempt to do it using vacuum instead of optical fiber as a medium to join them.
A lot of the things that make it complicated on Earth just aren't there on the Moon. Plus, we have a great excuse to keep a couple astronomers and engineers around to service the telescopes.
A telescope kilometers wide could image extrasolar planets.
Wouldn’t it be fun if our discovery of ETI were an image of its city lights.
Exoplanet imaging?
I love being surprised by new uses of exotic materials. Never thought I would read about quantum hard drives outside of science fiction.
What a great day is the day I received my first science book, learning about the great scientist named: Nikola Tesla, was very important to me, not just because he's very great in his field, but after this day I win a hero in my life. Some people like Super-man but my hero have electricity powers to show for everybody around the world, without the works of Nikola Tesla, maybe we don't have this great opportunity in Digital age to help each other in a remote way.
I remember how, as a physics student, I was pretty amazed to find that a CD I had lying around created inference rings from the sun shining on it and that I could quite accurately calculate the spacing of the track on the disk. I considered the sun to be a thermal light source - something that should not result in any interference. My conclusion at the time was, that the I was looking at single-photon interference and that the 'lateral coherence length' of the photons coming from the sun must be large. I didn't follow up on this, I'm ashamed to say. But it must me the prerequisite for the attempt to increase the effective aperture of the telescopes.
Another thought that came to me - we already know of a technique to store phase information from coherent sources for practically indefinitely, which is holography. Can anyone tell whether that would be an option for the use case?
edit: I should have spent a little more thought on this comment, but I mostly wanted to get it out of my head and maybe have others pick up on it. The issue with holography is, that the image is created by interference of a reference beam and the reflections from an object. Here, we don't want to image an object, but the light source itself. Maybe we can learn something about the light source when we have multiple holograms created with reference objects...