Fringe Labs is scientific non-profit developing a novel approach to optical interferometry.
By coherently combining light from multiple small telescopes, our platform achieves angular resolution based on the distance separating the telescopes instead of the aperture of a single telescope. This cost-effective approach enables us to resolve stellar surfaces, monitor binary star interactions, and investigate other fine-scale astrophysical phenomena that are often beyond the reach of traditional ground-based instruments. This approach, we believe, is the only scalable technology we have today to enable direct imaging of exoplanets
Our Vision
Our long-term mission is to develop the science and technology around interferometry. Currently the technology is capable of doing novel science directly with bright stars with ground-based telescopes. As we scale the baseline and aperture size we’ll be able improve resolution and image dimmer stars. Directly imaging exo-planets and distant asteroids is part of our objective.
Our approach focuses on
- A simplified beam-combining architecture
- Low-cost design to more rapidly deploy and iterate the technology
- Novel image reconstruction algorithmic approach
We aim to transform how high-resolution astronomical imaging is done.
Fringe Labs operates at the intersection of astrophysics, engineering, and accessibility. We believe groundbreaking tools shouldn’t require billion-dollar budgets. We are eager to collaborate with astronomers and scientists interested in our instrument.
What are Fringes?
When light is coherently combined it creates interference fringes which carry information about the light source. By measuring the interference fringes at different positions between two telescopes we can use this information to reconstruct what the image source looks like in finer detail. It’s effectively a different way of taking a photograph that requires lots of data capture and post-processing; you trade that for not having to build a giant expensive telescope! Note that the largest telescope is the ELT (extremely large telescope) that is 39m and costs $2B. We plan to scale in the near-term to 200m+ effective aperture by using small telescopes on train tracks for $Ms.
What about James Webb or Hubble?
The James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble are examples of excellent and important telescopes but they still can’t see much detail on individual stars. They can record detailed spectroscopic signatures from stars and have enabled amazing discoveries of exoplanets. However, they are too small to resolve details on a star surface or see what an exoplanet looks like. They are designed as a general purpose telescope and being in space don’t have to contend with the Earth’s atmosphere. Our interferometer telescopes is purpose built and designed for single (or binary stars) and the knowledge we gain will help design a scaled-up version that can be used for imaging exoplanets.