---
title: Flower-shaped Starshade Helping to Detect Planets — HIGH T3CH
url: https://hight3ch.com/flower-shaped-starshade-helping-to-detect-planets/
date: 2014-04-19
---

# Flower-shaped Starshade Helping to Detect Planets

Astronomers believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet, one fifth of which might harbor life. Only we haven’t seen any of them — yet. Jeremy Kasdin and his team are looking to change that with the design and engineering of an extraordinary piece of equipment: a flower petal-shaped “starshade” that allows a telescope to photograph planets from 50,000 kilometers away. It is, he says, the “coolest possible science.”