Wagner and his colleagues reckon they have improved upon today's methods, and can capture direct images of planets that are up to three times the size Earth located within habitable zones of stars near our Sun. This is broadly known as adaptive optics.” “This causes a sort of blurring effect, which a computer keeps track of in real time, and sends signals to the mirror to counteract. “Earth’s atmosphere distorts the light due to warm pockets of turbulent air that have different optical properties,” Kevin Wagner, first author of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Arizona, told The Register. A filter or mask is also applied to make it easier to pick out light reflected off a planet orbiting a star. The extra mirror mitigates the effect of Earth's atmosphere scattering incoming infrared light. Astronomers who devised a technique to capture direct images of nearby potentially habitable exoplanets have found what could be a world orbiting a star a mere 4.3 light years away from Earth in the Alpha Centauri group.ĭetails of the technique were published in Nature Communications on Wednesday, and it involves adding a secondary telescope mirror to today's ground-based 'scopes.
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