Some Obscurish facts
#1700
The world's best telescopic arrays now have a resolving power of about 0.1 milliarcseconds - in other words, if 13 billion points of light were to form a continous circle around the earth, they could see each point separately. To put this into perspective, a telescope this powerful would be able to distinguish 2 lines only 1 mm apart (there are 25.4 mm to the inch), from 2600km (1600 miles) away. They would be able to features on the moon as close together as 6 inches (150 mm)!! Another way to think of this remarkable feat is this: if two stars with sufficient brightness at the same distance from each other as the sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years away) were 9 billion light years away, or almost three quarters of the way to the edge of the universe, the world's best telescopic methods could view them as two separate points.
The world's best telescopic arrays now have a resolving power of about 0.1 milliarcseconds - in other words, if 13 billion points of light were to form a continous circle around the earth, they could see each point separately. To put this into perspective, a telescope this powerful would be able to distinguish 2 lines only 1 mm apart (there are 25.4 mm to the inch), from 2600km (1600 miles) away. They would be able to features on the moon as close together as 6 inches (150 mm)!! Another way to think of this remarkable feat is this: if two stars with sufficient brightness at the same distance from each other as the sun and its closest neighbour (Proxima Centauri, at 4.2 light years away) were 9 billion light years away, or almost three quarters of the way to the edge of the universe, the world's best telescopic methods could view them as two separate points.