How to Image Alien Worlds

Speaker: Dr. Emily Rickman, European Space Agency / Space Telescope Science Institute

Planets beyond our Solar System, known as exoplanets, are extremely difficult to observe. It’s equivalent to trying to take a photograph of a firefly next to a lighthouse from thousands of miles away.

The James Webb Space Telescope includes sophisticated optics, called coronagraphs, that can block the light from the central star of a system and reveal the speckles of light from planets nearby. Thanks to this technology, we have directly imaged alien worlds and advanced our understanding of gas giant planets like Jupiter.

The recently launched Roman Space Telescope also hosts a coronagraph. This instrument is a technology demonstration to push our current limits of this technique and to continue our dive into the unknown of imaging alien worlds.

This lecture will be presented with a livestream to YouTube, and questions can be asked in the YouTube chat. The recording will also be posted on our YouTube channel.