Many Milky Way stars have interesting objects orbiting them, such as planets; many of these objects are extremely hard to detect because glare from the host star gets in the way. Researchers may have found a solution to this problem.
A newly invented instrument uses adaptive optics and interferometry to pinpoint stars in nearby binary systems, and hope they will be able to do the same for resident planets in the near future, a University of California, Berkeley news release reported.
The teams used the Fibered Imager foR Single Telescope (FIRST), that was mounted on the Shane 3-meter telescope University of California Lick Observatories three years ago.
Using the tool, the team was able to distinguish between the visible light emitted by two stars in a binary system.
"This really is a window on a unique combination of contrast and resolution that is not available today for viewing the close environment around stars," UC Berkeley assistant research astronomer Gaspard Duchêne said.
Scientists recently determined there could be at least 40 billion habitable planets orbiting Sun-like stars and even some smaller "dwarfs."
"With the FIRST instrument at Subaru telescope, we expect to be able to resolve giant and super giant stars and observe the close environment of debris disks around young stars," coauthor Franck Marchis, a research astronomer at the SETI Institute, said.
The telescope is excellent at looking at close-by objects, such as binary stars and surrounding dust and gas clouds. FIRST also has the ability to distinguish "surface features on red super giant stars, which bloat to the diameter of Earth's orbit."
Most telescopes can't distinguish exoplanets from their parent stars due to glare, but FIRST uses fibers to solve to the problem.
As of right now FIRST cannot distinguish between two objects that differ in brightness by more than 50 to100 times. Earth-sized planets tend to be about a million times fainter than their host stars.
"If we could add enough fibers, we could get very high contrast; that is the goal," Duchêne said. "If we can scale this up to look for planets, it would be very, very exciting."
