Nature paper reports a starlight subtraction method that beats telescope instability in exoplanet imaging

4 November 2026

Direct imaging of planets around other stars needs the bright glare of the parent star to be removed from the picture. Standard methods build a model of that glare from reference images, so small shifts in the telescope between one observation and the next limit how faint a planet can be seen. A paper in the journal Nature sets out a physics-based method that models and compensates for those instrument instabilities instead. It couples a flexible physical model with multistep optimization, and uses automatic differentiation to fit millions of model parameters at once. The team demonstrated it on coronagraph observations from the James Webb Space Telescope's NIRCam instrument and reported sensitivity 2 to 15 times better than standard techniques, including the first detection of the planet 51 Eridani b at 4.3 micrometres. The authors say the framework can be carried over to ground-based and space-based observatories to come, including the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope and the Habitable Worlds Observatory. That would ease the very strict stability requirements such missions would otherwise need.