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Space Dust Will Help Us Decide Which Exoplanet We'll Visit First

2015 is shaping up to be a great year for the search for another Earth.
​Eyes to the sky. Image: ​Large Binocular Telescope Observatory

​We're less than three weeks in, but 2015 is already shaping up to be a great year for exoplanets. The most recent announcement: the NASA-funded Large Binocular Telescope Interferometer (LBTI) just finished its first of many​ inspections of dust in the habitable zone around a star, a process which will help us decide which Earth-like planets to study closer out of the thousands of possible candidates we've identified.

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According to NASA, the Kepler mission—which is now in the K2 phase, hunting for more exoplanets—has already identified more than 4,000 planets that might meet all the requirements to support life. As more potential exoplanets are identified and we start preparing to inspect these planets more closely, we nee​d to find ways to efficiently narrow down the results to our most-likely candidates. The LBTI will provide vital data to help us trim the list.

When asteroids collide or comets evaporate, they create dust around a star. If the dust is dense enough, it could prevent us from getting any usable information about an exoplanet when sending a probe to observe it.

"Imagine trying to view a firefly buzzing around a lighthouse in Canada from Los Angeles. Now imagine that fog is in the way. The fog is like our stardust. We want to eliminate the stars with fog from our list of targets to study in the future," Denis Defrère, who co-authored the study about the survey published in the Astrophysical Journal, said in a press release.

The LBTI will spend the next three years taking high-definition infrared images of the habitable zone around stars that have possible exoplanets and quantifying how dusty the area is. The researchers are looking for stars with ten times less dust than our solar system, ideal environments for observing exoplanets. The team wasn't lucky enough to find such a star on this maiden survey—the one they observed, eta Corvi, was 10,000 times dustier than our solar system—but they were able to show how precise the LBTI is.

While it's just one small step in the long, long journey towards being able to walk on the face of another Earth—as NASA beautifully imagined in a fau​x tourism ad campaign earlier this year—the LBTI's findings are another advancement among many we've seen this year. There was a new​ theory that could mean there are even more habitable planets than we realized. A rese​arc​her shared a detailed recipe for what's needed to make a habitable planet. NASA walked us through the di​re​ct-imaging missions that will allow us to examine new worlds. And best of all, there were eight new exo​pl​anet discoveries announced this year, including the two most-Earth-like planets we've ever found.

That's a lot of good news for space explorers in just a few weeks. If this is how 2015 is starting out, I can't wait to see how it ends.