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NARRATOR:

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Hey everybody, and welcome to Exoplanet Q
& Alien. Today we're going to be talking about

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something really cool called direct imaging.

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Direct imaging is a fairly new method of finding
exoplanets. It hasn't been until recently

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that telescope technology has advanced to
the point where it's possible.

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From a basic perspective, direct imaging is

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essentially taking pictures of exoplanets,
but it's a lot more complicated than that.

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You see, Earth's atmosphere is constantly

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moving around and distorting the light that
comes from objects in space. It's the reason

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that stars seem to twinkle in the night sky.

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In order to get around this, scientists use

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a system called "adaptive optics", which uses
a segmented mirror that can change its shape

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hundreds of times per second.

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The atmosphere is only part of the problem
though, planets are millions of times dimmer

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than the bright stars they orbit, and they're
very far away. Seeing an exoplanet is kind

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of like spotting a firefly flying around a
spotlight from the other side of the country.\

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To solve this problem, scientists use an instrument

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that blocks the light of a faraway star in
the same way that the moon blocks the light

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of the sun during a solar eclipse.\

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Right now, scientists and engineers at NASA
are working on two different methods for doing

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this.

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Coronagraphs, which are already being used
in ground-based observatories, block starlight

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after it enters a telescope.

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An external starshade, on the other hand,
would be a separate spacecraft that blocks

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starlight before it even enters the telescope.

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Either way, these instruments have the same
goal: blocking the light of a faraway star

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in order to see the planets that are orbiting
it.

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Right now, the best pictures we can take of

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exoplanets still look pretty blurry and blobby,
but we're just getting started.

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Future space telescopes might be so powerful

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that they can see stuff on other planets,
like continents and oceans and vegetation.