MRI: Development of Project 1640: Direct Exoplanet Spectroscopy

天文学家现在已经发现了400多颗围绕其他恒星运行的行星。事实上，所有这些令人兴奋的发现都是通过间接的方式获得的，即通过行星对其恒星的引力拖曳来推断行星的存在。实际上，只有少数几颗行星是通过天文学家的望远镜“看到”的。但自适应光学领域正在取得重大进展，该领域可以纠正来自遥远太阳系的光线穿过地球大气层时引入的图像失真；此外，掩蔽恒星的光以帮助看到暗淡得多的伴星的新功能也在开发中。天文学家希望，我们很快就能真正识别行星，并通过直接观察行星来表征它们的化学特性，同时掩盖来自恒星的光。美国自然历史博物馆的本·奥本海默博士正在领导一项开发技术和仪器的努力，这些技术和仪器将与自适应光学的进步合作，使这些观测成为可能。他将使用帕洛玛天文台200英寸哈尔望远镜的新自适应光学系统来进行他的调查。他的工作得到了美国国家科学基金会天文科学部重大研究仪器项目的支持。

Astronomers have now found over 400 planets orbiting other stars. Virtually all of these exciting discoveries were made by indirect means, inferring the presence of a planet by the gravitational tug and pull it makes on its star. Only a handful of planets have actually been "seen" through astronomers' telescopes. But significant advances are being made in the field of adaptive optics, which corrects for the distortion of images introduced as light from the distant solar systems passes through the earth's atmosphere; and new capabilities to mask the star's light to help see the much fainter companions are also under development. Astronomers are hopeful that we will soon actually be able to identify planets and characterize their chemistry by direct observation of the planets while masking the light from the star. Dr. Ben Oppenheimer of the American Museum of Natural History is leading an effort to develop techniques and instrumentation that will work with advances in adaptive optics to make these observations possible. He will use the new adaptive optics system at the Palomar Observatory 200-inch Hale telescope to conduct his investigations. His work is supported by NSF's Major Research Instrumentation program through the Division of Astronomical Sciences.