Are We “Waiting for Godot”? [Microwave Surfing]

Over the last three centuries, there have been many advances in optical telescopes. To find planets that may support life like our own planet, astronomers have to search for planets that orbit stars at the “Goldilocks” distance, not so close that they will be unbearably hot Jupiters and not so far away that they will be frozen Plutos. Locating objects within the bright glare of a host star is no easy task. But, as reported in a recent paper [1], [2] in Nature by a Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) group, scientists have made tremendous progress in the field. The JPL group used wavefront correction techniques applied to coronagraphs to observe optically a planet orbiting its host 33 light years away with a relatively small (1.5 m) earth-based telescope.