Direct Imaging Method

Next Generation Space Telescopes Could Use Deformable Mirrors to Image Earth-Sized Worlds

NASA and its commercial partners are working on deformable mirrors (DM) that will allow next-generation telescopes to directly observe exoplanets.

5 months ago

A New Planet-Hunting Instrument Has Been Installed on the Very Large Telescope

A new study shows how existing observatories like the ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT) can be upgraded to perform cutting-edge…

7 months ago

Watch an Actual Exoplanet Orbit its Star for 17 Years

Searching for exoplanets is incredibly difficult given their literal astronomical distances from Earth, which is why a myriad of methods…

8 months ago

A Direct Image of a Planet That’s Just Like Jupiter, Only Younger

In a recent study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a team of astronomers used the W. M. Keck Observatory…

10 months ago

Sci-Fi Christmas is Ruined! Planet Vulcan Doesn’t Exist

According to a new study, the exoplanet 40 Eridani b (aka. "Vulcan") was a false positive. Bad news for Star…

1 year ago

Do Exoplanet Scientists Have Favorite Exoplanets?

Exoplanets have become quite the sensation over the last decade-plus, with scientists confirming new exoplanets on a regular basis thanks…

1 year ago

If We Used the Sun as a Gravitational Lens Telescope, This is What a Planet at Proxima Centauri Would Look Like

A recent study shows how the Sun could be used as a gravitational lens to take direct images of nearby…

3 years ago

There are Natural Starshades Out There, Which Would Help Astronomers Image Exoplanets

A new study by an international team of astronomers has shown that eclipsing binary stars could act as a natural…

4 years ago

What Are Some Clues to the Climates of Exoplanets?

Researchers from the Carl Sagan Institute have created a new model for assessing the habitability of exoplanets that orbit different…

4 years ago

Astronomers Might Have Imaged a Second Planet Around Nearby Proxima Centauri – and it Might Have a Huge Set of Rings

A new study by a team using data from the Very Large Telescope's SPHERE instrument, may have caught a direct…

4 years ago