Astronomers have already discovered nearly 6,000 planets outside our solar system, but none of them are true “Earth twins.”
Scientists are especially interested in finding planets that are about the same size as Earth and orbit stars like our own sun at just the right distance for liquid water—and possibly life.
So far, this has been extremely difficult.
The challenge comes from the stars themselves. Stars like the sun produce a lot of “noise” that makes it hard to see the tiny signals from planets.
The sun’s surface is in constant motion, with bubbling plasma, magnetic fields, and dark spots.
To a telescope, this looks a bit like a pot of boiling water, full of flickering light patterns.
These shifting patterns can easily hide the faint shadow of a planet crossing in front of its star.
To solve this problem, a team led by Dr. Nuno Santos at the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences in Portugal is building a special new solar telescope called PoET—short for Paranal solar Espresso Telescope.
It will be installed in Chile by the end of 2025, right next to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in the Atacama Desert.
PoET is a small telescope, only 60 centimeters across, but it has a big job. Instead of searching for planets directly, it will study our own sun in incredible detail.
By carefully tracking the patterns of light from the sun, PoET will help researchers understand how stellar “noise” works. This information will then be used to improve another instrument called ESPRESSO, which is designed to detect planets orbiting distant stars.
The idea is simple: if we can figure out how to filter out the noise from our own sun, we can apply the same methods to other stars. This could make it much easier to spot small, rocky planets like Earth around stars that are otherwise too bright and too noisy.
This work is also laying the foundation for the European Space Agency’s upcoming mission PLATO, set to launch in 2026.
PLATO will use 26 cameras to look at a million stars, searching for Earth-like planets and studying their size, density, and makeup. But for PLATO to succeed, scientists need a better way to remove the stellar noise that hides planetary signals. That’s where PoET’s work will be essential.
If everything goes according to plan, PoET will start sending back results by mid-2026, just in time to help PLATO analyze its data. Together, these two projects could finally bring us closer to answering one of the biggest questions in science: are there other Earths out there?
Looking further into the future, even bigger projects are on the horizon. NASA’s Habitable Worlds Observatory, expected in the 2040s, will try to directly photograph Earth-like planets. Europe is also planning its next major telescope by 2030, which could help confirm whether any of these planets show signs of life.
For now, the search is still at the stage of cutting through the noise. But with PoET, ESPRESSO, and PLATO working together, astronomers are more hopeful than ever that we may soon discover another world like our own.
Source: KSR.
