What Can We Actually Find on an Exoplanet? Part 2: A Machine to Find Another Earth

What can we actually find on an exoplanet? Part 2: A Machine to Find Another Earth

The HWO is a super-duper Hubble, designed to find and directly image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. It uses a coronagraph, a device that blocks the light of the parent star to reveal the light of an exoplanet. The coronagraph is built with extreme precision, to cancel out the starlight at the spot where the planet's light is. The HWO is not a survey telescope but a hunter, aiming to achieve the contrast level needed to detect biosignatures. The telescope has to stay stiller than the jiggling of individual atoms, with the mirror holding its shape to within picometers. The HWO is not yet launched, expected to do so in the 2040s.

The HWO is a generation-scale engineering problem. The mirror is smaller than the James Webb, but it carries one instrument that earns it the title of biosignature hunter: a coronagraph. The coronagraph is designed to pull the planet out of the glare of the star, which is ten billion times brighter. The HWO is not a survey telescope, but a hunter, aiming to find and directly image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds. The goal is to find and directly image at least 25 potentially habitable worlds and take their pictures.

The HWO is not yet launched, expected to do so in the 2040s. The HWO is a generation-scale engineering problem. The mirror is smaller than the James Webb, but it carries one instrument that earns it the title of biosignature hunter: a coronagraph. The coronagraph is designed to pull the planet out of the glare of the star, which is ten billion times brighter. The HWO is not a survey telescope but a hunter, aiming to achieve the contrast level needed to detect biosignatures. The telescope has to stay stiller than the jiggling of individual atoms, with the mirror holding its shape to within picometers. The HWO is not yet launched, expected to do so in the 2040s.

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