coronagraph
CODEX Coronagraph Heads to the ISS on Cargo Dragon
A new space-based telescope aims to address a key solar mystery.
How to SUPPPPRESS Light From a Star That Is Ten Billion Times Brighter Than Its Habitable Exoplanet
Searching for Earth 2.0 has been an obsession of almost all exoplanet hunters since the discipline's dawn a few decades…
Webb Directly Images a Jupiter-Like Planet
The JWST has directly imaged its first exoplanet, a temperate super Jupiter only about 12 light-years away from Earth. It…
Suppressing Starlight: How to Find Other Earths
One underappreciated aspect of the current flood of exoplanet discoveries is the technical marvels that enable it. Scientists and engineers…
The Search for the Perfect Coronagraph to Find Earth 2.0
Studying exoplanets is made more difficult by the light from the host star. Coronagraphs are devices that block out the…
JWST Sees Four Exoplanets in a Single System
When the JWST activated its penetrating infrared eyes in July 2022, it faced a massive wish-list of targets compiled by…
Planning is Underway for NASA’s Next Big Flagship Space Telescope
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has only been operational for just over a year, but this isn’t stopping the…
A Last-Minute Addition to the Solar Orbiter Allows it to See More Deeply into the Sun’s Atmosphere
Spacecraft instruments are highly specialized and can take years to design, build, and test. But a last-minute hack to one…
It’s Already Hard Enough to Block a Single Star’s Light to See its Planets. But Binary Stars? Yikes
Detecting exoplanets was frontier science not long ago. But now we've found over 5,000 of them, and we expect to…
By Blocking the Light From a Star, Webb Reveals the Dusty Disk Surrounding It
AU Microscopii is a small red dwarf star about 32 light-years away. It's far too dim for the unaided human…