The hunt for Earth-like planets - what's out there? Credit: JPL/NASA
If you’ve lost count, since the 1990s, over 450 extrasolar planets have been detected circling nearby stars. But most of them are large, Jupiter-sized worlds.
New advances in technology are fueling the hunt to find smaller, rocky planets that resemble Earth – and possibly, evidence of life.
For example, Rochester Institute of Technology scientist Don Figer is developingdetector technology funded by NASA’s Technology Development for Exoplanet Missions Program. That work and resulting hardware is designed to directly image and characterize exoplanets.
The two-year funded project will result in a detector array that can withstand the radiation in space, count individual photons or light pulses — thereby eliminating noise that could obscure the faint signal — and characterize exoplanets in one-third the time it takes using existing methods.
“If you can detect something much more quickly you can search many more systems,” says Figer, director of the Rochester Imaging Detector Laboratory and professor in the College of Science at RIT. “A three-year mission becomes a one-year mission, or you can detect three times as many objects in the same fixed time. That’s usually what astronomers like to do.”
LD/CSE