This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Even the world's most powerful telescopes have their blind spots. Although NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can peer billions of years into the past, it still struggles to photograph planets orbiting nearby stars.
Stars shine with such extraordinary brightness that their glare overwhelms nearby planets' faint glow. Now, a Northwestern University–led team of astrophysicists has developed a new computational technique that cuts through the glare—revealing planets previously hidden from view. By combining physics-based modeling with machine-learning techniques, the new method accounts for tiny imperfections in the telescope that interfere with its ability to detect faint objects.
When the team applied its method to existing JWST observations, it improved the telescope's sensitivity by up to 15 times. After the new method erased glare, it revealed a giant exoplanet in an image where conventional processing simply could not see it. The advance could enable astronomers to discover smaller, colder and fainter planets without changing the telescopes themselves.
The study will be published on Nov. 4 in the journal Nature. "Planets are a million times fainter than their stars," said Northwestern's Rodrigo Ferrer-Chavez, who led the study. "So, to image exoplanets, we need to remove that glare.
That is a very tricky problem because even the tiniest changes in the telescope can affect how that glare appears. Slight shifts or tilts—even on the scale of just a few nanometers—can change the pattern of light. Our method models how light travels through the telescope and accounts for those tiny changes, allowing us to remove the glare much more precisely." Ferrer-Chavez is a Ph.D. student in astronomy at Northwestern's Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences, where he is a member of Jason Wang's research group.
Wang is an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Weinberg and co-author of the study. Wang and Ferrer-Chavez are members of the Center for Interdisciplinary Exploration and Research in Astrophysics (CIERA). Photographing a planet outside our solar system is a bit like trying to spot a firefly hovering next to a blazing floodlight.
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