Picture taken by SPHERE, showing the planet made visible after the star has been hidden by the coronograph (A).
Credit: © UNIGE
An international team, including members of the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, discovered an exoplanet by direct imaging using SPHERE, an instrument designed and developed by a consortium of 12 European institutes on the Very Large Telescope VLT ESO, based in Chile. The instrument, which corrects in real time the terrestrial atmospheric turbulences and occults the light of the star, allows to take a real “photography” of the exoplanet. While more than 3600 exoplanets were discovered through indirect methods, only a handful of them could be observed by direct imaging.
In order to take this kind of image, SPHERE is equipped with a deformable mirror that ...
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