499
Order of magnitude is a hell of a drug
(lemmy.world)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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I was surprised so I did the computation just to resolve the disk of Betelgeuse at 550 nm, and I found a telescope of 2.8 m, that's definitely already doable. We already have 8 m in one piece and 10 m segmented, JWST is 6.5 m segmented. The ELT is planned to be 39 m for 2028. So this star is closer and bigger than I thought.
And these are the images we have from one of the top imaging instrument SPHERE on the VLT in 2019. It's precise enough to show the change of shape due to its variable star type.