Some stars make it too bright for telescopes to spot far-away Earth-like planets. A 'starshade' could help.
in Chile’s Atacama Desert, along with a space-based instrument called a ‘starshade,’ an object that can be used to block the light of an extremely bright object.
“The sun is 10 billion times as bright as the Earth,” says Mather. “That’s an awful lot of glare.” Searching for small objects, especially “a little Earth,” within that intense glare is extremely difficult, he says. But a starshade offers a way to block a host star’s radiance. If deployed, this kind of hybrid observatory would allow scientists to explore corners of the Milky Way and other systems of interest much closer than existing technologies can today. Mather says a one minute exposure taken by a hybrid observatory would be long enough to prove that there’s an exoplanet in the area, and a one-hour exposure could give clues into whether there is oxygen or water in its atmosphere.But the technology needed to construct a starshade is still years away, Mather says.
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