Researchers combined solar telescope with Laser Frequency Comb to search for Earth-like planets

German researchers successfully combined the sunlight from an empty Solar Tower Telescope on Tenerife, Canary Islands with light laser frequency comb (LFC) to enable the search for Earth-like planets in distant space accurately and easily.

Who: German researchers
What: Combined solar telescope with laser frequency comb
When: The findings published in February 17, 2015
Why: To hunt for Earth-like planets in deep space

This development was published in the New Journal of Physics on February 17, 2015 and the study was led by Rafael Probst, a doctoral student at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Germany.

To search for Earth-like planets in space distance accurately, researchers first combined sunlight from an empty Solar Tower Telescope on Tenerife, Canary Islands, with the light of a CFL.

Both lights are then combined into a single mode fiber (SMF) by an optical multiplexer.

In this, obtained found that improved by a factor of about 100 over a fiber transmission accuracy temporarily separated.

The development of this new technique would allow the analysis of the measurement of speed universe by observing distant quasars.

In addition, researchers also believe that LFC will allow them to measure the Doppler effect much more accurately and thus increase the chances of detecting habitable planets, Earth-sized.

What is the laser frequency comb (LFC)?

Laser frequency combs (LFC) were conceived a decade ago as tools for precision spectroscopy of atomic hydrogen.
It was created by a laser emitting pulses of continuous light, containing millions of different colors, often covering almost the entire visible spectrum.
When different colors are separated based on their individual frequencies, form a comb-like finely spaced lines representing individual frequency graph.
The comb may then be used as a rule to accurately measure the frequency of light from a wide range of sources such as lasers, atoms or stars.