Imagine that you went to a recreational park with your family and asked the garden employee to take a group photo, and one of the celebrities was walking in the background.
Certainly, this famous will steal the image concentration .. Exactly this is the concept of “optical jamming”, and this is closely related to astronomers who are looking for housing planets.
When scientists direct a telescope to a planet outside the solar system, the light that the telescope receives can “pollute” light from other planets in the same star system, a problem discussed by a new study of NASA published in the magazine “Estrofzal Journal Litters” on August 11. .
The study put a model of how the “optical jamming” effect on an advanced spacecraft designed to monitor the external planets that are likely to be valid for housing and suggested possible ways to overcome this challenge.
“If you look at the Earth sitting next to Mars or Venus from a long -range point, depending on the time you noticed, you may think they are the same,” said Dr. Brabal Saxina, of the NASA Maryland, Maryland.
“For example, depending on the observation, the external land can be hidden in (light), which makes us mistakenly believe that it is a large external planet.”
Astronomers use telescopes to analyze light from far away worlds to collect information that may reveal whether they can discover signs of life in remote planets for decades.
The optical year is the distance that the light travels in the year, and it is regarding six trillion miles (more than nine trillion kilometers), and there are regarding 30 stars similar to our sun in regarding 30 light years of our solar system.
The phenomenon of optical jamming stems from the pollution of the notes of one of the planets with light from other planets in a system, and if this is the case, the data that scientists can collect will be affected by any world or other world Like Earth, outside our solar system.
Saxina examined a similar scenario where other astronomers can view the Earth from more than 30 light years away, using a similar telescope for that recommended in the nodal survey of astronomical physics for 2020.
And Saxina said: “We have found that such a telescope may sometimes see potential external planets exceeding 30 light -years mixed with additional planets in their systems, including those outside the area suitable for housing, for a group of different wavelengths.”
The living area is that area of space around the star, where the amount of the star light allows the presence of liquid water on the surface of the planet, which may allow life.
There are multiple strategies to deal with the problem of optical jamming, which Saxina mentioned in its study, including developing new ways to process data collected by telescopes to alleviate the possibility that optical jamming causes the results of the study to distort.
Another way is to study planetary systems over time, to avoid the possibility of planets with orbits near each other, and notes can be used from multiple telescopes or increased the size of the telescope to reduce the effect of optical jamming on similar distances.
