California Institute of Technology | 2017 Mar 29
Caltech astronomers develop new strategy for future telescopes
[img3="Artist's rendering of the future Thirty Meter Telescope. (Credit: Caltech/IPAC-TMT)"]http://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/www-p ... twork.jpeg[/img3][hr][/hr]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 to exist on the surface of a rocky planet. Other potentially habitable worlds have also been discovered in recent years, leaving many people wondering: How do we find out if these planets actually host life?
At Caltech, in the Exoplanet Technology Laboratory, or ET Lab, of Associate Professor of Astronomy Dimitri Mawet, researchers have been busy developing a new strategy for scanning exoplanets for biosignatures—signs of life such as oxygen molecules and methane. These chemicals—which don't naturally stick around for long because they bind with other chemicals—are abundant on Earth largely thanks to the living creatures that expel them. Finding both of these chemicals around another planet would be a strong indicator of the presence of life.
In two new papers to be published in The Astrophysical Journal and The Astronomical Journal, Mawet's team demonstrates how this new technique, called high-dispersion coronagraphy, could be used to look for extraterrestrial biosignatures with the planned Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which, when completed by the late 2020s, will be the world's largest optical telescope. ...
Observing Exoplanets with High Dispersion Coronagraphy. I. The scientific
potential of current and next-generation large ground and space telescopes - Ji Wang et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1703.00582 > 02 Mar 2017
Demonstration of an Active Single-Mode Fiber Injection Unit - Dimitri Mawet et al
- arXiv.org > astro-ph > arXiv:1703.00583 > 02 Mar 2017