New Worlds Mission

The New Worlds Mission is a proposed project comprising a large occulter flying in formation with a space telescope designed to block the light of nearby stars in order to observe their orbiting exoplanets.

This is primarily due to: The difficulty of observing such a dim planet so close to a bright star is the obstacle that has prevented astronomers from directly photographing exoplanets.

This concept was first famously theorized by Siméon Poisson in order to disprove the wave theory of light, as he thought the existence of a bright spot at the center of the shadow to be nonsensical.

By adding specially shaped petals to the outer edge of the disc, the spot of Arago will disappear, allowing the suppression of the star's light.

The starshade is a proposed sunflower-shaped coronagraph disc that was designed to block starlight that interferes with telescopic observations of other worlds.

The starshade is a spacecraft designed by Webster Cash, an astrophysicist at the University of Colorado at Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy.

The starshade acts as a very large coronagraph: it blocks light of a distant star, making it easier to observe associated planets.

With the reduction of the harsh light, astronomers will be able to check exoplanet atmospheres tens of trillions of miles away for the potential chemical signatures of life.