Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
A new NASA instrument designed to study dust in the so-called habitable zone around a star may help future missions centered around capturing images of planets similar to Earth, officials from the US space agency announced on Tuesday.
The Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI), a project funded by NASA, will not officially begin scientific operations until this spring. However, it recently completed an early study of N‘ band (9.81-12.41 μm) emissions surrounding the nearby main-sequence star η Crv (F2V, 1-2 Gyr).
The results of that research currently appear in The Astrophysical Journal.
One of the primary goals of the LBTI, located at the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory in southeastern Arizona, is to find stars that are 10 times less dusty than our solar system, making them good candidates for planet imaging.
The results of those surveys will help inform the design of forthcoming missions to Earth-like planets, also known as exo-Earths. While those missions are currently still in the early planning stages, NASA said, the dust trails detected by the new telescope could aid in the search for extrasolar planets capable of supporting life.
Those dust trails, the researchers behind the LBTI test explained, are a natural byproduct of the planet-formation process. However, too much of it can obscure our view of planets. Using this new instrument will allow NASA to better analyze that dust in habitable zones, or the regions around stars with conditions capable of supporting liquid surface water.
While the planet hunting Kepler mission “told us how common Earth-like planets are,” Phil Hinz, principal investigator of the LBTI project at the University of Arizona, said that the new instrument would help make it possible to “find out just how dusty and obscured planetary environments are, and how difficult the planets will be to image.”
From its perch atop Arizona’s Mount Graham, the telescope is expected to obtain the best infrared images ever of dust permeating a star’s habitable zone (also known as the Goldilocks zone).
Ordinarily, this task is made difficult due to dust from colliding asteroids and evaporating comets, which can outshine the far weaker light given off by a planet. Denis Defrère of the University of Arizona compares it to “trying to view a firefly buzzing around a lighthouse obscured by fog in Canada from Los Angeles.”
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