Story 4 — UCLA’s sub-diffraction telescope method

49:28We're going to wrap up with uh a nice physicsdefying story out of our local favorite UCLA. We literally can almost not go through one week without the UC system being one of our stories. This week it was two of our stories. >> That's right. >> We started with UCSD. >> This story is about new tech that's making our telescopes see things >> that really shouldn't be possible. >> Yeah. And this is out of the astrophysical journal letters. Um, I'm super excited about this story. Yeah, this is this is a pretty pretty crazy story. It's out of the UCLA astrophysics

50:08department along with a bunch of other institutions. What they've done is hack the telescope and have sharper views into the universe. >> Okay? And they hacked it to the point where even I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." Okay? They have they have a line that I'll get get to in their paper that I was like, "What are you talking about?" Um, okay. So, the goal is always higher angular resolution. You want to be able to resolve smaller and smaller things. The epitome of that is the event horizon telescope, which gave us that beautiful view of the black hole at the center of our Milky Way and the black hole in M86, which is a far far away galaxy. You're looking at uh a thing

50:49that's about the size of a solar system, maybe several solar systems, but it's millions of light years away, right? It's insane. >> It's not close. >> That Yeah, it's not close. It's something like I I mean, I think somebody was saying something like the head of a pin or they're resolving a quarter on the Empire State Building if you're looking from Los Angeles, right? Resolution is what what that means. How how fine detail can you resolve something in the night sky? And we want to always push this as far as possible. >> This is new work that came out of the UCLA astrophysics department. [snorts]