Question

What limits the size of a telescope on Earth?

Answer 1

QUESTION

What limits the size of a telescope on Earth?

ANSWER

With a telescope you want two things, light gathering and resolution. Light gathering goes up as the square of the diameter, so you want to a lot of diameter, either real or interpolated from a bunch of smaller mirrors. The problem is the weight and difficulty in manufacturing go up the as cube of diameter so, larger and larger mirrors get hard to make and hard to lift.

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