Astronomers Gear Up to Discover Earth-like Planets

As part of an international team of exoplanets hunters, we are developing a technique to detect faint dust clouds around other stars, many of which might hide Earth-like planets. Funded by NASA, our team is in the middle of carrying out tests to demonstrate the feasibility of these observations using both apertures of the Large Binocular Telescope, or LBT, in Arizona. The project aims at determining how difficult it would be to achieve the desired results before committing to a billion-dollar space telescope mission.