New Technology for Exploring Other Worlds

Planets around other stars are not just the domain of science fiction anymore. Over the past 30 years astronomers have gone from no knowledge of planets around other stars to being able to say how common or rare they are (spoiler: they’re common). Are any of these planets habitable? Do any of them have life? To learn this, we need to develop improved telescopes and instrumentation. Two key tools for this are adaptive optics (AO) and the development of large segmented mirror telescopes(LSMT). AO corrects for the blurring effects of our atmosphere, allowing us to effectively separate the planet from the overwhelmingly brighter light of its parent star. I will discuss the technology development being carried out at the UC Observatories to integrate AO and LSMT technology. The resulting large aperture adaptive telescope concept can provide the light gathering capability and precision imaging needed to scour our neighboring stars for Earth-twin planets.

Speaker: Phil Hinz, UC Santa Cruz