Star lampshade, which will help us to detect Earth-like planets
A Life / / December 19, 2019
The fact that we still have not found a planet similar to the Earth, does not mean that they are not. Perhaps they have a relatively short distance from us, but we can not see them! In his speech at the TED Jeremy Kasdin talks about how they are working with special equipment - "star shade" that will help us solve this problem in the near future.
Today we will have an evening almost science fiction. Nearly — because soon what is said in the speech, it will become a reality. Astronomers believe that every star has a planet, and that about 20% of them may be similar to our Earth, which automatically implies the existence of life. But finding these planets is very difficult because we are not able to send our machines so far and as fast as I would like to, so scientists still study the properties of the planets in blurred photographs taken with telescopes and satellites.
If you take a picture of our planet from the system Alpha Centauri, the nearest star with, we do not see, because it will disappear in the bright light of our sun. What to do? Create a special star shade that will travel with the telescope and obscure the light from the star, allowing the telescope to take pictures, which can be seen the world.