NASA Team Proposes Artificial Eclipse in Space to Discover Earth-like Exoplanets
A NASA-led team is advancing a concept called the Hybrid Observatory for Earth-like Exoplanets (HOEE), which proposes creating an artificial eclipse in space to directly image exoplanets. The plan involves deploying a large, flower-shaped 'starshade,' approximately 100 meters across, 175,000 kilometers from Earth. This starshade would precisely align with ground-based telescopes, blocking the intense light from distant stars. By doing so, it would allow the faint light from orbiting exoplanets, which are typically a billion times dimmer than their host stars, to be detected. The primary goal is to identify rocky, Earth-sized planets within the habitable zones of other star systems. This approach aims to enhance existing observatories rather than building entirely new, multi-billion dollar space telescopes, with the starshade itself estimated to cost around one billion dollars. 
