Overview
- Northwestern researchers published the FLIP technique in Nature on Wednesday and used it to reprocess archival James Webb Space Telescope coronagraphic images.
- FLIP, short for Physics-based Learning for Imaging Planets, builds a physics-based digital twin of JWST and iteratively tunes its optical and detector parameters to match real observations before subtracting simulated glare.
- Applied to three target datasets, FLIP improved sensitivity by roughly 2 to 15 times and revealed the giant planet 51 Eridani b in JWST data that standard processing had missed.
- Experts say the method could ease some hardware stability requirements for future direct-imaging missions such as NASA’s planned Habitable Worlds Observatory, but it does not remove the much larger picometer-scale stability improvements needed to image Earth-sized worlds.
- Researchers note further validation and wider testing are needed to see how broadly FLIP can be applied and which types of hidden or faint planets it can reliably recover from existing and future datasets.