TUTORIAL QUESTIONS 2: WAVES AND OPTICS

1) a) You are building a telescope. You have an objective lens with a focal length of 1m, and an
eyepiece with a focal length of 50mm. How much bigger will distant objects appear compared
to the naked eye?
b) If the objective lens has a diameter of 10cm, what is the smallest angular separation that
this telescope can resolve?

Figure 1. A 2-lens telescope

2) a) A point source of light emits n photons per second uniformly in all directions and each photon
carries energy hf . What is the intensity of light at a distance r from the source?
b) What is the amplitude of the electric field as a function of radius?
c) A single Barium ion in a trap emits 15 106 single photons per second at a wavelength of
455nm. You look at this ion through a microscope that collects light over a solid angle of 0.8.
How many photons per second get into the microscope and travel to your eye and what power
is this? (You can actually see this, heres some pictures .)
3) a) The unit used by radio astronomers to measure the power in the radio waves is the Jansky
(Jy). It is defined as:
Watts
1Jy = 1026 2 .
m Hz
That is, if you detect over a range of 1Hz, with an area of 1m2 and you measure a power of
1026 W, then you are measuring 1Jy!
Imagine you have a radio telescope tuned to 1.4GHz, and you measure power in a band of 1MHz
around this frequency. The diameter of the dish is 20m, and its radius of curvature is 40m. You
use it to look at one of the brightest radio objects in the sky, Cygnus A, which has a power
density of 1200Jy, at frequencies around 1.4GHz. How much power will you detect from Cygnus
A using this telescope?
b) How many years would you have to measure Cygnus A in order to collect the same energy
as the kinetic energy in a falling snowflake? (Typical numbers: snowflake mass about 1mg,
terminal velocity is about 1ms1 ).
4) Light with wavelength 500nm is incident on the internal surface of a piece of glass (n=1.5), the
angle of incidence is 43 degrees. On the other side of the glass is air.
a) What happens to the light?
b) How does the electric field amplitude vary on the air-side of this system?
c) What is the ratio of the energy in the field at a height of 1 wavelength above the surface
compared to the energy at the surface?
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