Inventing tools for detecting life elsewhere

Recently, astronomers announced the discovery that a star called TRAPPIST-1 is orbited by seven Earth-size planets. Three of the planets reside in the "habitable zone," the region around a star where liquid water is most likely ...

Small, Ground-Based Telescope Images Three Exoplanets

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have snapped a picture of three planets orbiting a star beyond our own using a modest-sized telescope on the ground. The surprising feat was accomplished by a team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory ...

NASA tool prepares to image faraway planets

The Roman Coronagraph Instrument on NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help pave the way in the search for habitable worlds outside our solar system by testing new tools that block starlight, revealing planets ...

The search for the perfect coronagraph to find Earth 2.0

Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the star light and both JWST and Nancy Grace Roman Telescope are equipped with them. Current coronagraphs ...

Proba-3 satellite: Seeing in the dark

One of the precision formation flying Proba-3 satellites as seen from the other during ground testing. The pair will fly in orbit relative to one another down to millimeter scale precision, but in order to do this must keep ...

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Coronagraph

A coronagraph is a telescopic attachment designed to block out the direct light from a star so that nearby objects – which otherwise would be hidden in the star's bright glare – can be resolved. Most coronagraphs are intended to view the corona of the Sun, but a new class of conceptually similar instruments (called stellar coronagraphs to distinguish them from solar coronagraphs) are being used to find extrasolar planets around nearby stars.

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