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Synthetic Aperture Photometry (Exoplanets)

D. Synthetic Aperture Photometry (Exoplanets)

  • The Science: Detecting an Earth-sized planet passing in front of a star (transit method).

  • Why your array fits: A single small telescope often has too much "scintillation" noise (twinkling) to see a tiny dip in light. By averaging (stacking) the flux from 10+ sensors simultaneously, you reduce this noise by the square root of the number of sensors ($1/\sqrt{N}$).