Record-setting Laser May Aid Searches for Earthlike Planets
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Scientists at the University of Konstanz in Germany and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated an ultrafast laser that offers a record combination of high speed, short pulses and high average power. The same NIST group also has shown that this type of laser, when used as a frequency comb—an ultraprecise technique for measuring different colors of light—could boost the sensitivity of astronomical tools searching for other Earthlike planets as much as 100 fold.
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The text is kind of turgid and not to-the-point, but the summary is that this could lead to a orders-of-magnitude improvement in the discovery of extrasolar planets using the most-commonly-used Doppler method of detecting a star's wobble based on frequency shifts of the light coming from the star.