OWL-Moon: Very high Resolution Spectropolarimetric Interferometry And Imaging From The Moon: Exoplanets To Cosmology

We outline a concept for OWL-Moon, a 50-100m aperture telescope located on the surface of the Moon, to address three major areas in astronomy, namely the detection of biosignatures on habitable exoplanets, the geophysics of exoplanets, and cosmology.

Such a large lunar telescope, when coupled with large Earth-based telescopes, would allow Intensity Interferometric measurements, leading to pico-arcsecond angular resolution. This would have applications in many areas of astronomy and is timely in light of the renewed interest of space agencies in returning to the Moon.

Jean Schneider, Joseph Silk, Farrokh Vakili

Comments: Accepted in Experimental Astronomy. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1908.02080
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics (astro-ph.CO); Earth and Planetary Astrophysics (astro-ph.EP); Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2208.05971 [astro-ph.IM] (or arXiv:2208.05971v1 [astro-ph.IM] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2208.05971
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Submission history
From: Jean Schneider
[v1] Thu, 11 Aug 2022 08:03:45 UTC (109 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2208.05971
Astrobiology,