NASA Scientists take picture of exoplanets by using small telescope

LOS ANGELES, April 14 (Xinhua) -- By using a small telescope, astronomers took a picture of three small planets orbiting a star outside the Solar System, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) announced on Wednesday.

The astronomers at the JPL snapped the new photo by using just a 1.5-meter-diameter portion of the Hale Telescope at California's Palomar Obserbatory, the JPL said.

The planets which orbit the star HR 8799 had been imaged previously by two of the world's biggest ground-based telescopes both on Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

To make the small telescope work, scientists combined adaptive optics and a coronagraph to minimize the glare from the star and reveal the dim glow of the much fainter planets, the JPL said.

The technique could be "used on small space telescopes to find possible Earth-like worlds near bright stars," said Gene Serabyn, an astrophysicist at JPL.

Keeping telescopes small is critical for space missions.

"This is the kind of technology that could let us image other Earths," said Wesley Traub, the chief scientist for NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program at JPL. "We are on our way toward getting a picture of another pale blue dot in space."

Serabyn and his team will report their findings in the April 15 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The three planets are thought to be gas giants similar to Jupiter, but more massive. They orbit their host star at dozens of times the distance between the Earth and the Sun.