June 20, 2008 - Science News
In the 13 years since the first discovery of a planet orbiting a sunlike star outside our solar system, astronomers have found about 300 such “extrasolar” planets, but still have no pictures of any of them.
These 300 orbs have only been detected indirectly: by the wobble of a parent star as an orbiting planet tugs on it, for example, or by minieclipses a planet generates as it passes in front of its star. But none of the current methods allow an astronomer to actually see the planet. With the first optical system devoted to extrasolar imaging set to begin surveying the heavens this summer — and with two other systems scheduled to come online by early 2011 — astronomers could get their first real image of such a planet within the next three years, and perhaps much sooner. “The pace is accelerating,” says Michael Liu of the University of Hawaii at Manoa.
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Efforts to image a planet beyond the solar system are heating up on two mountaintop observatories in Chile. Early last year, a new instrument arrived at the Gemini South Observatory atop Cerro Pachon. The Near-Infrared Coronagraphic Imager is the first adaptive optics system designed solely to image planets. “We’ve had general purpose adaptive optics instruments, but NICI is the first built from end to end for this express goal,” Liu say.
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Two successors to NICI are now in development. The Gemini Planet Imager is expected to begin operation at Gemini South by 2011, around the same time that a similar device, called SPHERE, for Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet Research, is installed at another Chilean observatory, the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope atop Paranal.
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