Direct Detection of Exoplanets
By Marija Strojnik
An optical technique that uses the wave nature of light could reveal planets outside our Solar System more accurately.
This Article From Issue
September-October 2023
Volume 111, Number 5
Page 274
The first time astrophysicists detected a planet outside of our Solar System around a Sunlike star was in 1995, and since then, more than 5,000 extrasolar planets (or exoplanets) have been identified. Despite that impressive number, detecting exoplanets is an incredibly difficult task. For an exoplanet the size of Jupiter, the planet is about a million times fainter and a hundred times smaller than the star it orbits. There is currently no optical instrument on Earth or in space that can separate these two objects as individual entities. Instead, the existence of such an exoplanet can be inferred from various data, but no Jupiter-equivalent exoplanet has yet been directly detected. We can assess its distance from its star and its temperature, but very little other information.
QUICK TAKE
- Thousands of exoplanets have been identified using several different methods, which mostly use the amount of light, radial velocity, or “wobble” of those planetary systems.
- All of these methods currently have drawbacks, including a large time separation between measurements, which introduces the potential for errors.
- A method adapted from optical testing uses the wave nature of light to allow measurements to be made in immediate succession, potentially increasing accuracy.
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