Inside the Race to Glimpse Alien Jupiters

Two rival teams of astronomers are racing to capture unprecedented images of giant planets around other stars. What they find could change the future of planet hunting

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High in the remote Andes of central Chile, the night sky is so dark that the constellations are hard to see, swallowed up in swarms of fainter stars. The familiar yet alien view can be disconcerting, but something else troubles Bruce Macintosh when he looks up late one May evening in 2014. Even here, at 2,700 meters above sea level, he is still staring through an ocean of air, and the wind is rising. The stars overhead are twinkling a bit too much for his purposes.

Macintosh is here to look for other Earths—or, more precisely, for other Jupiters, which some scientists think are necessary for rocky, habitable, Earth-like planets to exist. He is not interested in finding planets like most astronomers do, watching for months or even years as subtle shifts in a star's motion or brightness gradually reveal the presence of an unseen world. He is after instant gratification: he intends to take actual pictures of remote planets, to see them as points of light circling their distant stars, to look on their gas-swirled faces across the gulf of light-years. Macintosh, an astronomer at Stanford University, calls this “direct imaging.”

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