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Old January 18th 12, 11:09 PM posted to sci.astro
Steve Willner
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Default Exoplanet Discoveries

In article ,
Elassoto writes:
The Kepler telescope is discovering many planets by searching for
changes in a star's brightness when a planet transits across the face of
a star. However, with that method of observing planets, we cannot see
any of the details of the planet.


Kepler gives the planet's orbital parameters, its diameter, and
sometimes information on the mass if there are multiple planets.

While Kepler may not be powerful
enough to see details of the planet, maybe future telescopes, such as
James Webb will.


If you are talking about resolving the planet's disk, I don't think so.

To see the details it will have to see the bright side
of the planet, so it will have to see the planets while they are on the
far side of the star.


More generally, one would like to track the brightness of the planet
around its orbit. The Spitzer Space Telescope has already done some
of that. It has also observed secondary transits for quite a few
planets now. This gives the infrared emission of the day side of the
planet, which can tell something about the planet's composition or
atmosphere.

To do that they can use solar occlusion


You seem to be talking about a coronagraph, which JWST will have:
http://www.stsci.edu/jwst/instrument.../#coronagraphy
It's actually quite a bit trickier than just putting a black spot in
the focal plane.

A very few exoplanets have already been directly imaged by ground-
based telescopes.

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