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 A Laboratory for Innovation in Opto-Mechanics (LIOM) Project

Exo-life Finder

A telescope designed to search for life on planets beyond our solar system.

Are we alone?

Are we close to finding life beyond Earth, or is our planet truly one of a kind? The ELF project’s powerful imaging technology could soon answer this big question, changing how we see our place in the universe and challenging our beliefs about life itself.

Why ELF?

ELF will be the world's largest optical telescope with enhanced sensitivity. A special technique called Fizeau interferometry, where separate mirrors move independently to capture clear, high-contrast images of distant exoplanets.

Our team of scientists and engineers is from around the world

Imaging the Surfaces of Exoplanets

Ever since Galileo showed us that the planets had surfaces, perhaps like the moon or Earth, we’ve sought to see greater detail on the solar planets. In modern times we’ve done this with powerful telescopes and spacecraft fly-bys but now that we know there are more exoplanets in the sky than distant stars we dream of resolving these alien worlds with detailed surface images. ELF’s iconic mission is to create maps of these exoworlds with sufficient resolution to see oceans, continents, deserts, forests or even alien planetary scale construction or alien mega cities. This is not just a NASA dream, but something that we can plan and execute from the ground during our generation. Relatively new technologies, like machine learning, additive manufacturing, and new optical concepts that we now focus on this one objective, to see alien worlds, will allow us to wake one day to the news that astronomers have found life or even advanced life around a star that is less than 30 light years away.

Exoplanet Surface Imaging

The Proxima b exoplanet resides within the stellar habitable zone, possibly allowing for liquid water on its surface, as on Earth. However, even the largest planned telescopes will not be able to resolve its surface features directly. We employ an inversion technique to indirectly image exoplanet surfaces using observed unresolved reflected light variations over the course of the exoplanet’s orbital and axial rotation: ExoPlanet Surface Imaging

How is this possible?

The solid red line light curve is the best-fit model corresponding to the recovered map. The error bars of the simulated data are smaller than the symbol size.

ELF doesn’t directly make images, but it uses the light it collects from the exoplanet separated from starlight. This is the hard part, but when it succeeds that light varies over time because of the rotation and orbit of the exoplanet. The graph above shows a computer simulation of how the reflected Earthlight might look during the course of a year. The computer simulated the observations and then we took those data to see if we could “invert” (like what some artificial intelligence algorithms do) to deduce what the planet surface looks like. It seems almost magic but it works. We can take the graph of data above and use the computer and modern algorithms like Machine learning to deduce the structure of continents and oceans. In this simulation we are able to “see” the Earth that we generated the data from.

The magic of image inversion and machine learning

Original map. The original map is used to simulate the “observed” light curve (blue symbols in the relative brightness light ). 

What’s even more exciting is that this technique is robust. If the data is more or less noisy the effect is relatively benign in that these errors blur the continental boundaries with the exoplanet ocean, but maintain the overall fidelity of the exoplanet image reconstruction. This is illustrated in the figure below.

Recovered Map A

Recovered Map B

To solve these problems will require an optical instrument dedicated to this hard problem, and it must make continuous observations of many candidate exoplanet stars for the duration of each exoplanet orbit. For many star  systems this means we could begin to see images after a year of ELF’s ground-based observations or less. The images we get from ELF will change the way we see other planets in the galaxy and will undoubtably change the way we perceive life in the universe and here on Earth.

The Latest News

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Yesterday, we unboxed the first blank for the primary mirror segments of the SELF telescope!Once processed, this first SELF mirror will help us test...

Obtaining a direct image of a gaseous gigantic exoplanet

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The LIOM team welcomes their new Director

Today was an exciting day for the LIOM team, as we had the honor of welcoming at IACTEC our new Director, Valentin Martinez Pillet, and our Deputy...

Artificial neural network for wavefront sensing

John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton have been awarded the Nobel Price in Physics “for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable...

Meet the French Interns

Theophile Boillot and Jade Barret from the Institut d’Optique Graduate School

Nano ELF is Born

A Miniature of the Future Exolife Finder

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