U.S. astronomers hunt for nearby stars with new technology

U.S. astronomers are ferreting out the new targets after the glare of bright, shining stars has frustrated most efforts at visualizing distant worlds, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said.

So far, only a handful of distant planets, or exoplanets, have been directly imaged. Small, newborn stars are less blinding, making the planets easier to see, but the fact that these stars are dim means they are hard to find in the first place.

"Fortunately, the young stars emit more ultraviolet light than their older counterparts, which makes them conspicuous to the ultraviolet-detecting GEE," JPL said in a press release.

"We've discovered a new technique of using ultraviolet light to search for young, low-mass stars near the Earth," said David Rodriguez, a graduate student of astronomy at University of Californian, Los Angeles. "These young stars make excellent targets for future direct imaging of exoplanets."

Young stars, like human children, tend to be a bit unruly -- they spout a greater proportion of energetic X-rays and ultraviolet light than more mature stars. In some cases, X-ray surveys can pick out these youngsters due to the "racket" they cause. However, many smaller, less "noisy" baby stars perfect for exoplanet imaging studies have gone undetected except in the most detailed X-ray surveys. To date, such surveys have covered only a small percentage of the sky, according to JPL in Pasadena, Los Angeles.

Rodriguez and his team figured that the GEE, which has scanned about three-quarters of the sky in ultraviolet light, could fill this gap. Kazinform cites Xinhua. See www.xinhuanet.com for full version