Exoplanets: How Do Scientists Actually Make Us See These Worlds Beyond Ours

uBmuse

First Posted: Sep 13, 2016 04:40 AM EDT

The hundreds of exoplanets that astronomers have discovered in the past years are just little curvy dips on a graph. Astronomers who use the Kepler Telescope filter the planets out by examining the way the planets block out the stars' light as they move in their orbits. If astronomers could block out the stars, they would be able to see the planets directly. A new technique based on adaptive optics system in the storied Palomar Observatory has just been started. It's the first of its kind and is capable of spotting planets much farther from our solar system.

On August 24, astronomers found a new planet Proxima b orbiting the nearest star to our solar system, Proxima Centauri. The European Space Agency (ESA) even shared the surface view of a sunset on the planet. The scientists don't actually know what any exoplanet looks like. "But to imagine how the planets might actually be is central to scientists' interest in them", according to Lisa Messeri, a space anthropologist. "People had a passionate feeling about Proxima b because its proximity to Earth makes it very real."

In her book Placing Outer Space, Messeri has mapped the mental shift among scientists at a mountain top observatory in Chile, at the Mars Desert Research Station, in an MIT exoplanet group and at a Silicon Valley NASA center. "One of the first things you notice when you're spending time with exo-planet astronomers is just how little data they actually have to model ," says Messeri.

Using just a few data points scientists can learn about a planet's radius, the duration of its revolution and its distance from its star. They could even infer details about its composition or its temperature. When a scientist discovers an Earth-mass planet, their imagination has familiar places to run with variations on the theme of "Earth".

A NASA scientist told Messeri about his colleague who theorized a new kind of world on the basis of a "volatile-rich planet," representing an Earth-mass Planet that is smothered in liquid. A competitor who had come up with the similar idea called them "ocean-planets" in his paper. However, people paid attention to the second person because they could picture an ocean. "You have to make an argument not just beacuase that this is a planet but also that this is a place worth studying," says Messeri.

The new adaptive optics system is called Project 1640. The system removes the starlight glare so the astronomers can actually see the exoplanets. This is very hard to do, states Charles Beichman, executive director of NASA Exoplanet Science Institute. "You can try and Imagine to find a firefly flying around a flood light farther than a thousand miles from us," he said in a statement.

The system has the ability to resolve objects about 10 million times fainter than the object at the center, usually a star. With that level of its sensitivity, astronomers should be able to see planets. Now, astronomers have taken on a three-year survey of hot young stars.

See Now: NASA's Juno Spacecraft's Rendezvous With Jupiter's Mammoth Cyclone

TagsWorld, beyond, ours, Scientists, actually, make, See, Exoplanets, new optics system, How to see exoplanets, Adaptive Optics System, Palomar Observatory