[The Raven]

...CHARA can detect individual planets around binary stars

Wow!!!

[The Raven]

Here's a picture as well....

Top: Together, CHARA's six telescopes compose a light-gathering instrument with a maximum aperture, or baseline, equal to the farthest distance between two scopes: 1,080 feet. The Y configuration allows astronomers to vary the aperture for different observations. Bottom: For an interferometer to work, starlight gathered by separate telescopes must hit a detector at the same time. To compensate for the extra distance light travels to telescope 2, light collected by telescope 1 is diverted precisely the same distance on a delay line. Graphics by Matt Zang

[Conan the Librarian]

Dang and I thought my 10" Meade was the best. :(

[Conan the Librarian]

Dang and I thought my 10" Meade was the best. :(

[IronJack]

I'm no electrical engineer, but I would think an AND logic gate would overcome the synchronization problem. For a given signal, a threshold voltage would have to be overcome to drive the gate high, and the same voltage would have to come from every one of the sources. Until it did, no signal would pass.

But then, I'm sure better minds than mine have considered that idea.

[boris]

Paragraphs are our friends.

[longshadow]

Holy Grail of optical astronomy ping!

Optical interferometry is the way to go....

[VadeRetro]

"Eventually, those lessons will come back home, telling us what our sun was like in the past and exposing threats we can expect from it—giant flares, perhaps, or periods of dimming that could trigger an ice age.

Lovely! So in theory we could be toast in the next half hour. Except it hasn't happened so far since the formation of life on Earth.

[StopGlobalWhining]

These magnetic storms on the sun contribute to global warming here on Earth, and his extensive survey should show whether spots and flares are common and constant on other stars, whether they come and go in cycles of, say, a thousand years, or whether our sun is abnormal for having them at all.

Global warming? How could the sun have anything to do with global warming? Doesn't everybody know that humans wasting energy producing CO2 causes global warming?