CHARIS, new hardware that will aid the search for exoplanets

[Spaceception]

Holy moly, this new hardware will be capable of looking directly at exoplanets, and not only measure the size, but also the atmosphere, temperature, and age, this is big.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/exoplanet-telescope-charis-hawaii_uk_5829a1bbe4b0ec3145f8eeba

http://futurism.com/for-the-first-time-in-history-we-are-seeing-alien-worlds/

The telescope is still in testing, but will be used more next year.

Personally, I hope Prox b is one of the first targets.

[tater]

Quote

which already measured 8.2 metres long.

This is why huffpo is a cruddy source. One can only assume they are as clueless about anything else as they are about telescopes.

[kerbiloid]

That's the ultimate answer to questions like "How our starship would look like" and so on.

Tens of such telescopes revolving round the Sun on distant orbits.

A century later the KSP forum will discuss: "We can fly to Proxima on weekend, but why? What we still haven';t seen there?"

Hope they also have a thorium lines spectrometer to find out nuke maniacs hi-tech civilizations, to ... greet them first.

Edited November 16, 2016 by kerbiloid

[Andi K.]

There is some amount of truth to the huffpo article. However, there is some basic scientific illiteracy that they lack at some times during the article. For example, they say that it works by "reflecting light off of alien planets" which is possibly the dumbest thing anyone has ever said about exoplanets. Considering the closest exoplanet to the Earth is 4 light-years away, it would take at least 8 years for the light to reach the star and reflect back to Earth. Not only that, you would have to predict where the planet would be in 4+ years, and where your telescope would be in 8+ years. Even if that much was possible, who's to say that the planet won't reflect the light at an unpredictable angle, given that planets aren't perfectly spherical? How the instrument actually functions, according to Princeton is by localizing and focusing on the light coming from the exoplanet, allowing you to make more detailed observations about the planet. However, it is only functional on bodies larger than Jupiter, so we wouldn't be looking at future homes for the human species with this thing.

All of that being said, CHARIS still seems like a very interesting device, and it will no doubt give us loads of lovely science.

Edited December 3, 2016 by AndrewDrawsPrettyPictures

[Jonfliesgoats]

Exoplanets are people.  Now I have topped Huffington Post in saying the dumbest thing ever about exoplanets.  Take THAT, journalists!

Also, CHARIS will be really neat.

Edited December 3, 2016 by Jonfliesgoats