Suppose an ant is 1mm long, then if you observe it from 10,000km away, this ant is about 3×10-43times10^{-4} millicorniseconds!!! What is this concept? It is 100 times finer than the best current astronomical observation accuracy. For an ideal optical system, its maximum angular resolution S ≈ 1.220λr/a when using 550nm visible light to observe this ant, there is a ≈ 3947m that build a main lens diameter 3947m telescope, you can see a 1mm ants at 10000km away.
And currently the largest telescope well, is the great telescope under construction in Chile, the main mirror diameter 39m.
And in order to ensure accurate imaging, the surface accuracy of the telescope is nanoscale, temperature differences, the weight of the lens itself will make the lens has a lot of deformation affect the accuracy. Atmospheric disturbances can even ruin your images. And the larger the lens the more difficult it is to manufacture. The current large telescopes commonly use boron carbide and other materials to manufacture lenses, surface aluminum plating, the use of multiple lenses spliced into a large lens, etc., the existing precision processing and precise control technology can not achieve a 4000m diameter optical telescope, after all, the order of magnitude gap is there.
Space telescopes without atmospheric disturbances, gravity, temperature differences, etc., seems to be able to achieve 4000m aperture, but now the largest space telescope James Webb telescope aperture is 6.5m, weighing 6.2 tons, has been too expensive (10 billion dollars) delayed several launches. The manufacture of a 4000m aperture mirror requires tens of thousands of tons of boron carbide and other materials to manufacture the main lens, not to mention its servo mechanism and even the spacecraft carrying it, the size of this is completely Jagdpanther level, and now humans do not have the ability to launch hundreds of thousands of tons of objects into orbit.
Of course, we can also reduce the wavelength for observation, if we use 5.5nm extreme ultraviolet, then the lens aperture can be reduced to 39m. However, extreme ultraviolet can not be propagated in the air, and can only be used in space. The short wavelengths also pose a challenge in terms of lens materials, and even the need to use grazing methods like the Chandra X-ray telescope, which increases the difficulty of imaging. The corresponding manufacturing difficulty is still an order of magnitude difference compared to the current level of human technology (I have never seen an EUV lithography machine that can carve wafers several meters in size), so the difficulty of using a single telescope to image this ant is beyond the current level of technology.
Contact Person: Mrs. Christina Yi
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