Anand Sivaramakrishnan

SUNY Stonybrook & American Museum of Natural History, Professor

Smaller mirror, more planets?!

The James Webb Space Telescope, Hubble's successor, is being fitted with a special planet-detecting camera. This device will throw away 80% of the light the telescope collects, but in doing so it will be able to take pictures of planets much closer to their parent stars than conventional techniques. I will explain how this strange, less-is-more, detection method works along with examples of discoveries it has already made.