A team of researchers from Harvard recently published a studysuggesting that a complex theory of quantum physics could be harnessed to create massive, high-resolution telescopes.
Astronomers of the future will be able to see the most distant regions of the universe via teleportation..
Technically, it's called "entanglement," from "entanglement," but it would work almost like teleportation. How would it work? A pair of quantum particles would become "entangled" with each other in such a way that whatever happens to one particle will happen to the other, even if they're separated by any distance.
The idea is that with the help of quantum technology we will be able to build very large telescopes. The largest telescope we have today is called the Extremely Large Telescope. The mirror is 40 meters and costs a billion dollars.
But engineers are using a different solution to reduce the cost of building giant telescope mirrors: they add smaller mirrors in groups called arrays. Unfortunately, the larger the arrays, the greater the data loss.
These telescope systems can be built with today's industrial limits.
Quantum entanglement could change all that, but, unfortunately, it requires receiving a continuous stream of entangled photons in space. Despite recent discoveries, and our understanding of quantum computing, the number of entangled photons is reaching unmanageable numbers.
But what if there was a way to reduce the number of entangled photons required?
That's exactly what the Harvard team did.
Their work shows that by exploiting a phenomenon called “quantum memory,” the number of entangled photons required to operate the telescope of the future will be much lower.
According to the researchers:
The necessary entanglement distribution rate is reduced by several orders of magnitude, which opens realistic prospects for using short-range quantum networks for any high-resolution imaging.
But the team says a telescope could be 30 kilometers across – 100 times larger than the largest currently available.
As the Harvard team’s work continues to evolve – and advances in quantum hardware continue, it’s now almost certain that the telescopes of the future will be larger, with higher resolution and less expensive materials.
This means that we will soon see the quantum era of astronomy.
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