Tuesday, 15 March 2011

angular resolution - Inability of Hubble to clearly resolve nearby celestial objects

This has to do with the angular resolution of the Hubble telescope and the ratio between the distance of an object in space and its size in space. The galaxies that the Hubble telescope can see are bigger in size than they are far in light years away compared to pluto from earth.



Take the galaxy NGC 5584 for example:
It spans 50,000 light-years and it's 72 million light-years away which gives us a ratio of 0.00069



Then for pluto:
Pluto spans 2400 km in size and 4675 million km away which gives the ratio of 0.00000051



Take for example a clear view at a mountain with trees on it. You would see the mountain fairly clearly: you can see it has trees on it, perhaps snow, and other aspects. But if you look at any given tree on that mountain you can't make anything other than it's observable color and that it's most likely a tree. The relationship of distance in size is what gives you a good view of the mountain but not a tree on the mountain; the trees size to distance ratio is much smaller than the mountain's size per distance ratio.

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