Exoplanet Direct Imaging: Visualisation · Signals from the Periphery

EXOPLANET DIRECT IMAGING
Digging a pale blue dot out of the glare
a star, a planet, a mask, and ten billion to one
an Earth twin at 10 pc: 100 mas away, 1e-10 as bright
the lab has already held 4e-10 in vacuum
a 2 pm wavefront ripple fakes an Earth exactly
pick a telescope · tilt the orbit · read the verdict

Evidence

fact ⇄ what kind of claim · live

Earth beside the Sun: ~1e-10 in reflected light, 100 mas at 10 pc

arithmetic on albedo, phase and orbit · Ag·Φ(α)·(R/a)²

MEASURED

A flawless mirror still glows: first Airy ring 1.75%, wings ~1e-4 at 10 λ/D

textbook diffraction, drawn exactly · Born & Wolf

MEASURED

A 2 pm wavefront ripple makes a 1.6e-10 speckle: a fake Earth

(πa/λ)² · why the requirement is ~10 picometers per cycle

MEASURED

JPL's vacuum testbed has held ≤4e-10 across a 10% band

Decadal Survey Testbed, 2019 · the mission number, touched in a lab

MEASURED

98 planets imaged of 6,333 known; in reflected light: zero

NASA Exoplanet Archive, Jul 2026 · all self-luminous, all infrared

MEASURED

Fomalhaut b was a planet for twelve years, then a dust cloud

Kalas 2008 → Gáspár & Rieke 2020 · what a false positive looks like

REPORTED

HWO's ~25 exo-Earths are a yield model riding on η⊕ = 0.24

Astro2020 · Stark-formalism yields scale as D^1.8

MODELLED

Whether a pale dot means an ocean is a reading, not a measurement

Archean Earth was orange and inhabited · the file stays open

READING

…

…