California IN BRIEF : LIVERMORE : Scientists to Create Fake Star With Laser

Scientists plan to use a laser to create a fake star over the San Francisco Bay Area, but it will be too dim at first to be seen by the naked eye. The so-called “guide star” generated from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory will help astronomers use computers to remove distortions in pictures of real stars. Stars appear to twinkle because of the constant churning of the Earth’s atmosphere. As a result, pictures taken from ground-based telescopes are distorted. About 60 miles above Earth, the laser beam will hit sodium atoms from meteorites that have entered the planet’s atmosphere and cause them to glow a yellowish color. As wind buffets the star, its movement will reveal exactly how much the turbulence is blurring images of real stars. Then computers will use the data to remove blurring from other astronomical images. That could help astronomers produce images as clear as those from a telescope in space, which now take the best pictures of stars.