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PBS Space Time
The Real Possibility of Mapping Alien Planets!
Season 8
Episode 29
This is the craziest proposal for an astrophysics mission that has a good chance of actually happening. A train of spacecraft sailing the sun’s light to a magical point out there in space where the Sun’s own gravity turns it into a gigantic lens. What could such a solar-system-sized telescope do? Pretty much anything. But definitely map the surfaces of alien worlds.
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12:14
Could we turn our solar system into a spaceship and drive the Sun around the galaxy?
16:00
If we want to see quantum weirdness with our eyes, we’ll need Bose-Einstein Condensates.
16:42
Could LIGO find alien spacecraft accelerating to near light speed?
15:51
How can we tell the difference between fermions & bosons? Statistical Mechanics!
13:25
Why has a newly discovered a black hole started pointing directly at us?
15:57
There’s a hard limit to humanity’s expansion in the universe. So, how big can we get?
16:49
Let’s figure out the absolute limit of our future view of the universe!
16:28
Physics is the business of figuring out the structure of the world. So are our brains.
14:28
Nuclei are held together by a quirk of nature, without which there’d be nothing.
16:29
Your motion through the universe is extremely complicated, so let’s figure it out!