Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2019

36 SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2019 SPACE CHRONICLES hidden by its glare) can be seen dur- ing a total eclipse, so the corona- graph creates a kind of artificial eclipse of its target star, blocking its light and allowing much dimmer ob- jects in its vicinity to be detected. This marks a significant advance in observational capabilities. The coronagraph has been installed on one of the VLT’s four 8-metre- aperture telescopes, upgrading and modifying an existing instrument, called VISIR, to optimise its sensitiv- T his image shows NEAR mounted on UT4, with the telescope in- clined at low altitude. [ESO/NEAR Collaboration] T his image shows the NEAR ex- periment being mounted on the Cassegrain focus of the VLT’s UT4. [ESO/NEAR Collaboration] from their host stars; resolving a small planet close to its star at a dis- tance of several light-years has been compared to spotting a moth cir- cling a street lamp dozens of miles away. To solve this problem, in 2016 Breakthrough Watch and ESO launched a collaboration to build a special instrument called a thermal infrared coro- nagraph, designed to block out most of the light coming from the star and optimised to capture the infrared light emitted by the warm surface of an orbiting planet, rather than the small amount of starlight it reflects. Just as ob- jects near to the Sun (normally