{"id":7099,"date":"2014-03-26T18:48:33","date_gmt":"2014-03-26T18:48:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=7099"},"modified":"2014-03-26T18:48:33","modified_gmt":"2014-03-26T18:48:33","slug":"masking-out-a-star-to-see-its-planets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hobbyspace.com\/Blog\/?p=7099","title":{"rendered":"Masking out a star to see its planets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Masking out the intense bright light a star so that the dim reflected light of its planets, especially small earth-like ones, can be seen is no easy task. As mentioned in an earlier\u00a0post<\/a>, a starshade is a specially designed occulter that blocks a star’s light in a way that greatly reduces the diffraction around its edges. A starshade would be placed in space so that a telescope thousands of kilometers from it could observe planets around a distant star.<\/p>\n

New Worlds Mission<\/a>\u00a0is a starshade project that has done early studies but has not been funded for implementation of an exoplanet observation system. This article provides more details on starshades:\u00a0Incredible Technology: Giant Starshade Could Help Find an Alien Earth | Space.com<\/a><\/p>\n

As it stands now, the assumed $1 billion mission would be able to target about 55 bright stars in a three-year span. [Sara Seager<\/a>], the chair of NASA’s science and technology definition team for the starshade project, thinks it’s possible to find Earth-like planets orbiting 22 of those 55 stars targeted by the mission.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

One major advantage to the starshade is that astronomers won’t need to couple it with a large, extremely expensive space telescope. By blocking out the light of a star before that light ever reaches the telescope, the starshade eliminates the need for a huge telescope, Seager said.<\/em><\/p>\n

“You don’t need a very fancy telescope that’s highly thermally and mechanically stable,” Seager told Space.com. “You can use any old space telescope. We can buy a telescope. That’s what we’re thinking of. \u2026 It sounds a little funny, but any telescope will do.”<\/em><\/p>\n

More at<\/p>\n