2002-04-01 | SCIENCE, MISSIONS, TECHNOLOGIES
Testing Smartest Technique for Finding Extrasolar Planets
An obstacle to finding
planets orbiting other stars is that faint planets get lost in the glare of
the bright star nearby. Astronomers hope to work around the problem using nulling
interferometry.
Interferometry
is the technique of combining images from several telescopes to create a single
large virtual telescope called an interferometer. The image in each telescope
is made from waves of light, and each wave consists of peaks and valleys. Merging
several light waves into one makes the peaks taller and the valleys lower,
effectively creating a single, stronger light wave. Nulling interferometry,
however, aligns the lights waves so that some of the peaks
and valleys cancel each other out. This can be used to nullify
the bright light from a star so that the much dimmer planet can be seen.
The European Space Agency (ESA) will use nulling interferometry in its Darwin
mission, a team of six
space telescopes that will search
for small, solid planets like Earth and signs on life on them. But first
ESA has to test the method on the ground. So it's teaming up with the European
Southern Observatory (ESO) to build the Ground-based European Nulling Interferometer
Experiment (GENIE) using ESO's Very
Large Telescope (VLT). The VLT is a set of four big telescopes that can
be combined to serve as an interferometer.
Besides testing technologies for Darwin, GENIE will also hunt for stars surrounded
by rings of dust, which may
indicate the presence of planets. GENIE could even get the first direct
glimpse of extrasolar planets, which so far have only been detected indirectly.
NASA's Terrestrial
Planet Finder will also use nulling interferometry to look
for Earth-like planets and signs of life.
More on this story
Full text of original item
from ESA, Apr 01, 2002
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