Uploads from Dr. Becky

Currently Playing: Why do telescopes shoot LASERS into the sky?! #shorts

It's the atmosphere that has scuppered attempts to directly image exoplanets from the ground before, and why we tend to use space telescopes with chronographs to do this. The atmosphere smears out the light in your images, think about turbulence on an airplane, the same thing shaking you awake, shakes up starlight too. It’s quite literally why we sing twinkle twinkle little star. What it means is that any faint signals get lost in the noise. Unless you can correct for that smearing, which is what adaptive optics does. It fires lasers into the atmosphere to record what happens to the tiny laser dot, and then subtracts those effects off the image to get the crispness back. And this is why ground based telescopes are now starting to contend with space based telescopes - especially because we can build much bigger telescopes on the ground than we can send on a rocket into space. And the bigger the telescope, the fainter the object you can detect and the smaller thing you can see too. You have the resolution to be able to split out two separate objects that are very close together, that would otherwise blur into one with a smaller telescope. Watch full video here: https://youtu.be/zdTsaf68wd8 Soliman et al. (2026) - paywalled - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-026-02787-9 Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com