Record-setting Laser May Aid Searches for Earthlike Planets

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.

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Would it do that by correcting for abarrations?

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jwj

If you always believe what you already know, you can't learn anything - Liz

Current reflex-Doppler planet searches get their frequency/wavelength standards from inserting something like an iodine cell into the beam, providing numerous narrow absorption lines superimposed on the stellar spectrum which allows data reduction to track and any shifts due to instrumental flexure or changes in image centering. A frequency comb can do this with narrower-band reference signals spread throughout the spectral range of interest (in a way this is like engineering a custom material, going beyond the limitations of absorbers which exist in nature). This would improve the Doppler error for some kinds of stars - hot fast rotators not particularly, since their line are so broad that this contribution already dominates the error (hence the idea of looking for planet signals for such stars when they are headed toward red-gianthood and rotating more slowly - not much help for individual stars, but helps for the whole class figuring the planets don't go anywhere in between).