Atmospheric blurring has a new enemy

摘要

At the time of writing, observations from the Kepler Space Mission have yielded more than 975 confirmed exoplanet detections from 4,234 candidates. These candidates are identified by small, periodic drops in the brightness of the star, indicating that a Planet. might be transiting in front of it. This is perhaps the conceptually simplest method of finding exoplanets, and it remains the only approach that can find planets, with the proper orbit and radius to potentially support life. However, follow-up observations of high spatial resolution are needed to confirm and characterize each candidate system detected by the Kepler mission. Writing in The Astrophysi-cal Journal, Law et al. describe how they have used a robotic adaptive optics system to follow up 715 of the Kepler candidate star systems in just 36 hours of observing time.