Planet Hunters End Glare

In a way, the astonishing thing about this achievement is that it is derived from mathematical modeling and not step by step adjustment of the device.  This informs us both that it works and that further improvement is possible.

This is a huge step away from classical optics which is a bread and butter course for Physics majors.  Optics suddenly becomes a cutting edge field of theoretical investigation.

We are now able to directly detect planets down to several AU and it appears that we will get down through the ‘life ‘zone now with a little more effort or additional ‘adjustment’

This means of course, that we will soon be detecting such planets and all will be in some form prospective as living quarters for life.

Recall my posts on Venus, in which I observe that Venus can be terraformed by the simple expedient of comet bombardment, brought on by a comparatively modest disturbance in the Kuiper Belt.  We will have that capability in time.

Planet Hunters no Longer Blinded by the Light

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OCTOBER 14, 2010

http://nextbigfuture.com/2010/10/planet-hunters-no-longer-blinded-by.html

 Very Large Telescope, or VLT, atop Paranal Mountain in Chile, the new technology enabled an international team of astronomers to confirm the existence and orbital movement of Beta Pictoris b, a planet about seven to 10 times the mass of Jupiter, around its parent star, Beta Pictoris, 63 light years away. 

At the core of the system is a small piece of glass with a highly complex pattern inscribed into its surface. Called an Apodizing Phase Plate, or APP, the device blocks out the starlight in a very defined way, allowing planets to show up in the image whose signals were previously drowned out by the star's glare.

"This technique opens new doors in planet discovery," said Phil Hinz, director of the UA's Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at Steward Observatory. "Until now, we only were able to look at the outer planets in a solar system, in the range of Neptune's orbit and beyond. Now we can see planets on orbits much closer to their parent star."

In other words, if alien astronomers in another solar system were studying our solar system using the technology previously available for direct imaging detection, all they would see would be Uranus and Neptune. The inner planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and Saturn, simply wouldn't show up in their telescope images.

To put the power of the new optics system in perspective: Neptune's mean distance from the sun is about 2.8 billion million miles, or 30 Astronomical Units, or AUs. One AU is defined as the mean distance between the sun and the Earth. The newly imaged planet, Beta Pictoris b, orbits its star at about seven AUs, a distance where things get especially interesting, according to Hinz, "because that's where we believe the bulk of the planetary mass to be in most solar systems. Between five and 10 AUs."

While planet hunters have used a variety of indirect methods to detect the "footprints" of extrasolar planets – planets outside our solar system – for example the slight gravitational wobble an orbiting planet induces in its parent star, very few of them have been directly observed.

According to Hinz, the growing zoo of extrasolar planets discovered to date – mostly super-massive gas giants on wide orbits – represents a biased sample because their size and distance

The breakthrough, which may allow observers to even block out starlight completely with further refinements, was made possible through highly complex mathematical modeling.