1. Goal: To understand what it will take to find another “Earth”
Objectives:
To learn about What type of stars and planets to look for if we want to find life
To understand How to find these planets

2. Problems: Current methods do not look at planet directly.
No way of telling if there is life on the planet.

3. Finding smaller planets
Eventually we want to find Earth sized planets.
We are getting to smaller and smaller and will continue to do so.
However, to do better we need to go to space!

4. Interferometer
An interferometer is a telescope that is slit into two or more parts and spread out over a large area.
What this does is effectively gives you a bigger diameter to your telescope.
Since resolution ONLY depends on effective diameter, and not the amount of light your collect, this can give you very good resolution.

5. Why not done already in optical
One complication, you have to be able to know the distance between telescopes accurate to the wavelength of light.
For radio this is easy because the wavelengths are long.
For infrared and optical this is hard because the wavelengths are very tiny.

6. What it will do
Allow you to get a better separation of star and planet on the image
Allow you to watch the two objects orbit each other

7. Advantages Can be used on any star.
Can be used to detect planets as small as the earth!
Can be used to find planets further away.
HOWEVER: The star is still much brighter than the planet

8. We want to find LIFE! To do this we have to look at a planet.
However, planets are so small that we have no hope of actually imaging their surface features from many light years away – sorry no finding oceans and continents.
So what can we do?

9. Chronographs
When you have multiple detectors for measuring light you can determine how you add those together.
If you are clever you can get them to add together.
If you are even more clever you can get them to cancel out!

10. Blocking the star
To image a planet directly you have to get rid of all the light from the star.
If you can do that then you have a better shot at imagine a planet.
If you can image the planet you can take its spectrum.

11. Finding life How do we determine if there is life?
We need a signature that only life would be able to create.
Stay tuned….

12. Conclusion
We need an interferometer to be able to separate the planet and star on the image
We need a Chronograph to block the light from the star to see the planet directly
We need to take a spectrum of the planet