Monday, February 20, 2012

What is the angular diameter of a star like the sun located 5ly from Earth?

Is the Hubble Space telescope able to detect detail on the surface of such a star?What is the angular diameter of a star like the sun located 5ly from Earth?About 1/300 arcsecond. No. It can't even resolve it as a disc instead of a point. To show the star as a disc, the telescope would need an aperture of about 100 metres. To show features like sunspots and prominences you'd need an aperture about 100 times larger still. But you could get around this problem by having several Hubble telescopes a few kilometres apart. Something like this is already on the drawing boards.

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