Link to full articleMany astronomers would, however, like to view the planet directly - a difficult thing to do. Seeing the planet next to its bright star has been compared to trying to discern, from a hundred meters away, the light of a match held up next to the glare of an automobile's headlight. The approach taken by Grover Swartzlander and his colleagues at the University of Arizona is to eliminate the star's light by sending it through a special helical-shaped mask, a sort of lens whose geometry resembles that of a spiral staircase turned on its side.
The process works in the following way: light passing through the thicker and central part of the mask is slowed down. Because of the graduated shape of the glass, an "optical vortex" is created: the light coming along the axis of the mask is, in effect, spun out of the image. It is nulled, as if an opaque mask had been place across the image of the star, but leaving the light from the nearby planet unaffected.
Even if it can only see the larger planets currently detected it will validate the detection systems as accurate.
Topic: Optical Vortex Could Look Directly At Extrasolar Planets (Read 960 times)