Beyond the solar system, we have discovered a large number of new planets, but we have not yet intuitively discovered any worlds with life. Now that may be the case, this may have to be changed. A new technology may allow us to see a part of the world we've been looking for. In its first probe, it discovered one of the closest neighboring planets that may be orbiting the sun.
Most planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets) are discovered through their effects on the parent star, either blocking a small amount of light or producing some slight motion. Intuitive detection is limited by rare cases, such as some planets with younger lifespans, so they still have enough temperature to be detected by infrared rays. Still, we're confined to large planets far enough away from their "sun" that their light isn't obscured in strong light, and that's not where we want to look for life.
However, Kevin Wagner, a graduate student at the University of Arizona, says we couldn't find the results we wanted, in part because we were always looking for the wrong part of the spectrum. Observing exoplanets is tried in the near-infrared band with wavelengths of less than 10 microns, but the planets we are looking for may have longer wavelengths and are the brightest.
Kevin Wagner said in a statement that while this may seem self-defeating, the reason for [these choices] was because the Earth itself was shining at such wavelengths. After all, Earth emits the brightest light in the terrestrial planets we look for that emit the same wavelength, but that doesn't make the whole thing easy. Infrared rays, cameras, and telescopes emitted from the sky drown out the signals themselves.
Kevin Wagner described in Nature Communications the use of a combination of large telescopes (VLT) instruments to observe alpha centauri galaxies with wavelengths of 10-20 microns, which shields radiation from Earth and binary stars.
"We move in every tenth of a second in the corona observer and move a star away." Kevin Wagner said, "This allows us to observe each star half the time, and more importantly, it also allows us to subtract one frame from subsequent frames, which essentially eliminates all noise from the camera and telescope." Kevin Wagner and his partner took more than 5 million photos in 100 hours, and they stacked those photos together, and he likened the whole process to the way noise-canceling headphones work, removing unwanted parts.
In the process, Kevin Wagner discovered a light source and named it C1, which seems to be located in the habitable zone of Alpha A Centauri, and more work needs to be done to rule out the effects of machines and dust fog, although C1 may be real.
"There's a point source that looks like the planet we're expecting, and we can't explain it with any systematic error correction." Kevin Wagner said.
The team wanted to verify that C1 was real through subsequent observations of VLT and apply the same method to other stars. But this approach also has limitations, and in addition to using the most expensive telescopes for a long time, the target is limited to nearby stars. In addition, Kevin Wagner's technique is not able to find planets as big as Earth. The smallest object it can observe is also 3-5 times the radius of The Earth, which makes it almost certain that the observed star is a Neptune-style gas planet rather than a super-Earth.
Related knowledge
The Very Large Telescope (abbreviated as VLT) is a large optical telescope built by the European Southern Observatory in Chile, consisting of four identical 8.2 m aperture telescopes with a combined equivalent aperture of up to 130 m. The four telescopes can be used alone or as an optical interferometer for high-resolution observations. The Very Large Telescope is located at the Parena Observatory, 130 km south of Antofagasta, Chile, at an altitude of 2,632 m, where the climate is dry, with more than 340 sunny nights a year.
Each very large telescope has a primary mirror aperture of 8.2 meters, a focal ratio of F2, a weight of 22 tons, and a thickness of 18 centimeters, using an R-C optical system with an active optical system with 150 actuators installed below. The telescope bracket adopts a theodolite device, the lens barrel weighs 100 tons, and the 470-ton frame floats on a 0.05 mm thick oil film and can be rotated flexibly. The four telescopes were named Antu, Kueyen, Melipal and Yepun in the local Mapuche language, meaning Sun, Moon, Southern Cross and Venus, a name proposed by a Chilean schoolgirl in a naming competition initiated by the European Southern Observatory.
The development of the Very Large Telescope began in 1986 and cost more than $500 million. The first telescope, the Sun (Antu), was built in 1998 and officially used in April 1999, with the main instruments being infrared and optical band cameras and spectrographs. The second telescope, the Kueyen, was completed in March 1999 and officially used in April 2000, with two large spectrographs as the main instruments. The third telescope, The Southern Cross, was completed in January 2000, and the fourth telescope, Yepun, was completed in July 2000, with a surface grinding accuracy of 8.5 nanometers.
In 2005 and 2006, the European Southern Observatory built four auxiliary telescopes with a diameter of 1.8 meters near the Very Large Telescope, which together with four 8.2 meter telescopes constitute the Very Large Telescope Interferometer (VLTI). These auxiliary telescopes do not significantly increase the concentrator area of the interferometer, but they can increase the number of baselines and improve the quality of the image. Construction of the Very Large Telescope was fully completed in February 2012.
By Stephen Luntz
FY:PATRICK
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