2/28/2024 0 Comments Free Сфера 3![]() SPHERE is designed to exploit a clever way of suppressing the stellar light contribution. ![]() ![]() But have you ever tried to block the sunlight with your thumb? If you have, then you will probably have noticed a blinding ring of light around your shadowed finger. SPHERE blocks out the central region of the star to reduce its contribution - this type of instrument is called a coronagraph, and is used (as the name suggests!) to study the outer layers of the Sun. One major obstacle to directly imaging a distant exoplanet is that the light of any star is so powerful from our point of view that something close to it, like a planet orbiting the star, is swamped by the starlight. For example, HARPS, another successful planet finder, uses indirect techniques to find planets by determining radial velocity variations. More than a thousand exoplanets have been discovered since the 1990s, but only a very few have been detected directly. In either case, direct imaging is extremely hard to do. SPHERE can also obtain images of discs of dust and debris around other stars, where planets may be forming. SPHERE is a powerful planet finder and its objective is to detect and study new giant exoplanets orbiting nearby stars using a method known as direct imaging - in other words, SPHERE is trying to capture images of the exoplanets directly, as though it were taking their photograph. To help in this task, an instrument was carefully planned and, after years of studies and construction, installed on Unit Telescope 3 of the Very Large Telescope (VLT): SPHERE or the Spectro-Polarimetric High-contrast Exoplanet REsearch instrument. One of the most challenging and exciting areas of astronomy is the subject of ongoing research at ESO's Paranal Observatory: the search for exoplanets - new worlds orbiting other stars.
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