A telescope that could photograph continents and oceans on an exoplanet? NASA is like that
In the last 25 years, astronomers have discovered over 4,000 exoplanets. Only a few of them were able to see directly in the pictures, but there were only single pixels. Are we doomed to it? Over the past quarter-century, humans have discovered over 4,000 extrasolar planets, or planets orbiting stars other than the sun. It doesn’t change the fact that we didn’t see any of them directly, and the few that we were able to see are only single pixels. Is there really no way to properly photograph exoplanets so that it appears to us as a disk on which we could see oceans, continents or clouds? Currently, the mirrors of the largest ground-based telescopes are 10 m in diameter. However, the situation will change significantly over the next few years. In Chile, the Extremely Large Telescope is being built, the mirror of which has a diameter of up to 39 meters, and yet next to it are also made other equally impressive telescopes such as TMT (Thirty-meter Telescope) or GMT (Giant Magellan Tele...