
The universe's resolution limit - dnetesn
https://theconversation.com/the-universes-resolution-limit-why-we-may-never-have-a-perfect-view-of-distant-galaxies-50993
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agentgt
I'm but a dumb computer developer but I have often wondered if it possible
(not now but way into the future) to make a telescope like detector based on
neutrinos. Although you still have the resolution problem I think neutrinos
are affected by different things than photons (ie ambient light should not be
a problem). I know there are neutrino detectors but none of them show the
shape of galaxies (I think).

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pif
The fundamental question is: if neutrinos provide a better signal because they
overall interact much less than photons (a visible photon coming from the
farthest corner of the universe will stop running as soon as it meets my eye;
a neutrino can cross a star without noticing), how will you get them to
interact with your telescope? That's a big problem for direction detection,
too: with a telescope, it's easy to determine which direction the light comes
from, as it can cross the front glass but not the surrounding casing. When a
neutrino (out of several billions crossing your detector) finally gives a
signal, you can't even know whether it's coming from the sky or out of the
Earth!

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xiaoma
I only studied through an undergrad modern physics level. Is this talking
about planck length or something else?

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fennecfoxen
No, it's talking about optical resolution. If you were to make an image of the
universe surrounding our Solar System and galaxy, there's a maximum number of
pixels that you could zoom in and see before everything gets fuzzy due to
spacetime warping the path of the photons as they made progress through the
universe. (Like taking a photo through frosted glass, except the frosting is
much finer here.)

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Ono-Sendai
It is talking about planck-scale stuff though. And the effect is pure
conjecture.

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fennecfoxen
Yeah, if you mean it that way then the conjectured phenomenon providing the
fuzzing seems to be basically at-or-around Plank-scale stuff which arises from
having the Heisenberg uncertainty principle around (because there's a hard
boundary on the precision with which a process could demonstrate that space is
_empty_ , so in practice, it's not strictly empty, just a close approximation
that's can have quantum fluctuations).

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themadcreator
If this affects only the most distant observations, I wonder if this can
already be detected in our observations of the CMB.

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dang
Url changed from [http://phys.org/news/2015-11-universe-resolution-limitwhy-
vi...](http://phys.org/news/2015-11-universe-resolution-limitwhy-view-
distant.html), which points to this.

