INTERSTELLAR OVERDRIVE

NEW TECHNIQUES HELP ASTRONOMERS DISCOVER NEW PLANETS FASTER THAN EVER

- WRITTEN BY: DAMIEN MARTIN

The astronauts in Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” have the fortuitous appearance of a wormhole to provide a shortcut to potentially Earth-like planets that can sustain the human race as conditions render our planet uninhabitable. Our planet-hunters don’t have that luxury — or Matthew McConaughey to pilot them around the universe — but they have new techniques for identifying potentially habitable worlds. Whether it’s building a better telescope, training machine learning algorithms, or pioneering Al breakthroughs, today’s astronomers are finding planets that might harbor life faster than ever.

THE RIGHT ANGLE

Compared to other methods, Heidi Newberg’s idea might seem low-tech, even simple. But it could prove to be a breakthrough that can “find half of all existing Earth-like planets orbiting sun-like stars within 30 light years in less than three years,” Newberg, a professor of astrophysics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York, wrote.

Newberg’s proposal is to use a 1 x 20 meter (65.6 x 3.3 feet) rectangular mirror for a planet-hunting telescope rather than the circular mirror with a diameter of 6.5 m (21.3 ft.) like the James Webb Space Telescope has. The Webb mirror is too small to detect an Earth-size, water-rich planet in the habitable zone of a sun-like star, Space.com reported, and building a version of the mirror large enough to do the job would be too costly.