A DISH of magnetic oil could prove a cheap and simple way to sharpen fuzzy images of far-away objects.
Unlike telescopes in space, ground-based telescopes have to view the heavens through the Earth’s atmosphere, which distorts the light from distant objects. This explains why stars twinkle.
To improve fuzzy images, astronomers usually find a well-characterised star in the region of space they are looking at. Because they know what this star should look like, they can use it to measure how much the light is being blurred as it travels through the atmosphere and then correct for the effect.
Usually…
