What kind of telescope would we need to actually SEE exoplanets? Is that even possible?

>a planet 1.44au in size

I take it you don't know what resolving means. Each pixel in that image is more than 0.206au x 0.206au. That's 19,148,896 miles x 19,148,896 miles. Jupiter is only 86,881.4 miles wide. Meaning you aren't seeing shit at all in that image.

It is more feasible to make an array of smaller stuff and send them up so they can cover that amount of space when hooked together.

>posts pic that completely backs up the other poster's statement
I posted a picture of exoplanets as OP requested, I did not claim they are resolved. Try reading. Secondly you'd have to some sort of moron to believe that posting a picture of unresolved exoplanets confirms that it is absolutely impossible to resolve an exoplanet.

I said it was bullshit because it is. If you believe otherwise then explain why there isn't "enough information".

> I did not claim they are resolved.

The post you replied to specifically stated, "resolve" and you called that bullshit and posted that image. You totally implied it.

Where did I claim anything was resolved in that image?

>Meaning you aren't seeing shit at all in that image.

It seems you don't understand what resolving means. You can't resolve any of the stars in the sky (other than the Sun), you can still fucking see them. An object doesn't have to be spatially resolved to be detected. OP said nothing about resolving exoplanets, he said seeing them. You can see them right there.

read: and shut the fuck up, kid.

>he post you replied to specifically stated, "resolve" and you called that bullshit and posted that image.
No I replied to OP and clearly stated "(pic related)", i.e. to that statement. I then replied to someone talking absolute shit and called them out on it. Notice how I did not say "(pic related)" for the second statement. If you literacy skills are failing you then try reading the context.

You still haven't told me how there isn't "enough information".

>No I replied to OP

Now you are making shit up. You specifically quoted and said "Complete bullshit."

WEW LAD
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You can't, no more than you can see a moon buggy on the Moon from Earth.

skyandtelescope.com/observing/how-to-see-all-six-apollo-moon-landing-sites/

>kid
Ah, butthurt. You just demonstrated you don't know what the fuck your talking about and now instead of logic comes anger. Tell me again how we can't see the stars or planets in this image:

The lunar debris is slightly different. Because it's against a bright background a telescope would have to have high resolution to tell it apart from the Moon. If the lunar lander were out in space at the distance of the Moon it would be easily detectable, the telescope wouldn't have to resolve it to detect it. Exoplanets can be seen (), but they're a long way from being resolved. Because they're against a relatively dark background we don't have to resolve them just to see them.

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>still not knowing what resolving means

Sure thing, kid.

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How much of the (observable universe) have we actually mapped?

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None.

We can't actually see anything outside the Heliopause.

The James Webb or a 3 meter telescope would be able to directly image exoplanets, if we deployed a starshade to block the light out of star the exoplanet orbits
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Worlds_Mission

It depends what you mean by mapped. There are images of the whole sky but only bright nearby galaxies are detected in these. There are deeper imaging surveys but these only detect even the brightest galaxies out to about 1/4 of the distance to the edge. Although these surveys can detect the brightest objects (quasars) over most of the distance to the edge these are only a tiny fraction of the objects in these regions. These surveys are limited to about 1/2 of the sky so they can't see 1/2 the volume of the universe even if they detected all galaxies.

To explain how shallow these wide surveys however you can consider the Hubble Ultra Deep Field can detect galaxies about 4000 times fainter and even it is missing 90% of what we might call a galaxy. Although HUDF can see basically to the edge it misses the small, faint galaxies along the way.

Then there is another level, 3D surveys (pic related). This involves getting a spectrum for every galaxy detected in one of these imaging surveys. There are deeper spectroscopic surveys but at greater distances they only sample the very brightest galaxies. They're mapping space on large scales but not on small scales.

So it all depends on what you define as mapped.

What happens if you get to the edge. Will you eventually run into another universe.

The observable universe is set by the observer. If you were to move you would just have a new edge at the same distance it was before. According to the standard model of cosmology as you moved you would just find more and more universe which looked much like our observable universe. According to that model the true universe is infinite and without a physical edge.

It's so difficult for me to put this into words, but so these images I have seen, showing supposedly the whole universe (of course up until the Hubble sphere), where the boundaries are (for some reason) oval, and millions of little dots are contained within, are missing a huge number of objects? If you were to guess how much of the universe we have actually discovered, again, of course within Hubble sphere, what would it be?

The reason I ask () is because whenever I read an article or something about a new solar system being discovered hundreds of thousands of lightyears away, my reaction is always, "you mean we've discovered things on the fringes of the universe ages ago and only now discovered this, relatively close by?"
Pardon my ignorance.

Totally unrealistic. But then almost no large telescopes use lenses.
Launching a ten km mirror would break the world economy (with current technology) but is absolutely right about "faking it" with an array. They'd have the resolution, but not the light-gathering capability.

>what would it be?

0.000000000000000000000000001% Probably many orders less than that. The telescopes we use are used by a lot of people with different agendas. Some are happy to make them stare into a single dim part of space for the next 100 years while others want to look at the moon and nothing else and there's everything in between. The main problem is that most have to rent/trade/fight for time on the scopes. Then years later....it takes even more years for people to sift through the data. Software and AI are getting better at helping and there are online programs you can join to help as well:

planethunters.org/
diskdetective.org/

>so these images I have seen, showing supposedly the whole universe (of course up until the Hubble sphere), where the boundaries are (for some reason) oval, and millions of little dots are contained within, are missing a huge number of objects?

Yes. So take my image for example. All galaxies are not in that picture. If you were to go back and observe the fainter galaxies you would increase the density.

I'm not sure what you mean by the oval.

> If you were to guess how much of the universe we have actually discovered, again, of course within Hubble sphere, what would it be?

Again, it's not really something you can put a number on because "discovered" doesn't have a clear meaning. When we survey the universe we are usually only trying to detect certain objects. For example we have surveyed maybe 40% of the universe for really bright quasars, but if you ask about very faint dwarf galaxies we can't even claim to have measured the ones around the Milky Way. In astronomy we don't survey the universe in chunks of volume, we are usually limited by the apparent brightness of objects.

> I read an article or something about a new solar system being discovered hundreds of thousands of lightyears away, my reaction is always, "you mean we've discovered things on the fringes of the universe ages ago and only now discovered this, relatively close by?"

Just because we can measure galaxies on the edge of the universe doesn't mean we know everything about the universe up to that distance. Exoplanets are difficult on their own because even if we image the sky very deeply in normal surveys we don't detect them. This is because they're close to their star and it takes indirect methods or very specialised instruments to detect them. Exoplanets don't just turn up when looking at the most distant galaxies, you have to go looking for them.
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Sorry, I guess a 3D oval is called an ovoid.

So why do scientists always entertain the idea of aliens visiting us? Isn't it basically impossible? Unless, somehow, more advanced life exists somewhere else in our solar system - chances of which are nil. If light speed is the theoretical speed limit and the nearest star is about 20k ly away, doesn't that make it impossible for other life to reach us? Unless, of course, wormholes...

Oops, 'ovoid' in shape regarding the boundaries of the universe. The pictures always seem to be ovoid and not spherical, can't imagine why though.

Think about it in terms of detail we can measure in galaxies. Exoplanets are really just the extreme detail of our galaxy, the Milky Way. At the end of the universe we can detect only the very bright galaxies, but apart from that we know almost nothing about them. We can't see individual stars in these distant galaxies, or even intermediate distance galaxies. We certainly can't detect exoplanets. On the other hand we know more about our galaxy than any other, we can study with more resolution than any other galaxy. We can study it in fine detail but that doesn't mean we know everything about it.

To sort of illustrate the point about detail the survey that did this (), called the Sloan Digital Sky Survey recently made the largest 3D map of the universe over 5 years. It is now going back however with new capabilities to measure some of the very closest ones in more detail. Instead of just getting a distance to each galaxy it will measure many spectra on each galaxy to study how them rotate, move and hundreds of other things to understand how galaxies evolve. The previous surveys just weren't equipped to make these measurements. In the future SDSS we come even nearer, spending most of it's time studying the Milky Way. Experiments like SDSS have to chose which galaxies or stars to observe, they can't do everything at once. So when they studied the more distant galaxies they weren't able to study the Milky Way or exoplanets at the same time.

If you're referring to this sort of image, the oval is just a projection (called Mollweide) which is used to project a sphere onto a flat plane. The image is of the whole sky, it needs to be projected onto a 2D image. You can plot the surface on the Earth on Mollweide projection similarly.

This is an image of the Cosmic Microwave Background, it's the most distant light detectable in the universe which originates from very near the edge of the observable universe.

There's a theoretical idea to use the same kind of refraction as rainbows to make a lens hundreds or thousands of km across.
>Send pod full of glitter to lagrange point
>disperse glitter
>send fleet of laser satellites to glitter cloud
>laser satellites use radiation pressure to shape the cloud
>you now have a 2000km lens

The nearest star (discounting the Sun) is only 4 LY away.
You probably meant "nearest civilization is 20,000 LY away" -- and you might very well be right. There's a great deal of "pulling numbers out of thin air" in that estimate though.

Even 100 LY would be a long, expensive, trip -- unless pretty well EVERYTHING we know about physics is wrong. I don't worry a lot about a SETI transmission bringing "Independence Day" (or even "Childhood's End") aliens down on us.

Skeptical, but interested.
Link to source?

I have seen images like that before, such as the Earth. I'm sure it was a 3D model of the universe, or it may have been simply a structure, like our local group or something

Sorry I meant 20 ly.

And what information can we glean from these surveys? Elemental composition of planets - conceivable?

jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=4553

>And what information can we glean from these surveys? Elemental composition of planets - conceivable?
It depends what the survey is for. Surveys like SDSS ( (You)) amied to study mostly cosmology. By making very big maps of the universe they could study how the universe was seeded with structure and how the expansion of the universe has accelerated. Survey like MANGA () want to look for signs of how galaxies evolve, though mergers for example.

SDSS has also done a survey to detect exoplanets but few results have been published yet. The atmospheres of exoplanets are not something you really get from surveys, you need long dedicated observations. Surveys give you lots of statistics, big numbers of objects, not extremely detailed observations of individual objects.

How do we even know Jupiter's atmospheric make composition?

Primary though spectroscopy. Different atoms and molecules leave different fingerprints on the light which is reflected off Jupiter. In the case of Jupiter the Galileo probe also carried mass spectrometers into the atmosphere.

Brainlet cant argue properly

Doable on the Moon. Better would be to manufacture it in space though, since movement could prove rather destructive.

Interesting.
Long way to go before demonstrating feasibility, but nothing obviously impossible. Thanks.