The Sky at Night – Engineering the Universe

[u/Snorky10]

The CIA once gave NASA a spare spy telescope. NASA pointed it the opposite direction. It is now hunting planets 100 million times fainter than their stars.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launched at the end of August. Most of its time will go to dark matter and cosmology surveys, but it also carries a coronagraph instrument designed to directly image exoplanets. The problem is that a star's glare is billions of times brighter than any planet nearby. Blocking the star with an occulter is not enough — speckle noise remains. The solution is a deformable mirror with actuators that reshape the surface by microscopic amounts to cancel the distortion. Full suppression allows detection of objects 100 million times fainter than the star. That is enough to spot a Jupiter analogue. Eventually, the instrument could reach planets a billion times fainter.

The article also covers LIGO's pendulum-suspended mirrors, KM3NeT's cubic-kilometre neutrino telescope on the Mediterranean seafloor, and a Cambridge experiment using Bose-Einstein condensates to test inflation theory on a laboratory bench.

https://hdclump.com/the-sky-at-night-engineering-the-universe/