27 Exoplanet Targets for the World's First Private Space Telescope
A new era in space astronomy may be dawning — not driven by a government agency, but by private enterprise. The Lazuli Space Telescope, the brainchild of Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google and co-founder of Schmidt Sciences, is poised to become the world's first privately funded space telescope. With a planned launch before 2029 and a primary mirror stretching 3 meters in diameter — surpassing even the iconic Hubble Space Telescope's 2.4-meter mirror — Lazuli is generating considerable excitement across the astronomical community. New research now sheds light on one of its most scientifically compelling capabilities: the direct imaging of exoplanet atmospheres using reflected starlight.
A Private Telescope Unlike Any Other
While space telescopes funded by agencies such as NASA and ESA have long defined the frontier of astronomical discovery, the Lazuli Space Telescope represents a fundamentally different model. Backed by Schmidt Sciences, a philanthropic science foundation, Lazuli is designed to be both scientifically rigorous and operationally agile — freed from some of the bureaucratic constraints that can slow traditional space missions. Whether this translates into greater efficiency or introduces unforeseen complications remains an open and fascinating question, but the ambition is unquestionable.
Lazuli will carry three cutting-edge scientific instruments:
- A wide-field optical imager, capable of surveying large regions of the sky with exceptional sensitivity.
- An integral field spectrograph, which simultaneously captures spatial and spectral information across a field of view — ideal for dissecting the light from complex astrophysical objects.
- The ExtraSolar Coronagraph (ESC), the instrument at the heart of the new research, designed to block out the blinding glare of host stars and reveal faint orbiting planets in reflected visible light.
The ExtraSolar Coronagraph: Seeing Planets in a New Light
Coronagraphs have a storied history in solar astronomy, originally invented in 1930 by French astronomer Bernard Lyot to study the sun's corona without waiting for a total solar eclipse. Modern coronagraphs adapted for exoplanet science work on the same fundamental principle — suppressing the light of a central star to expose the vastly dimmer objects orbiting it. The ESC on Lazuli is designed to accomplish this in the visible and near-infrared wavelengths (approximately 0.5–2 microns), rather than in the thermal infrared where most current direct-imaging instruments operate.
This distinction is scientifically profound. New research, published on arXiv and titled "The first selection of optimal targets for the Lazuli ExtraSolar Coronagraph's reflected starlight exoplanet campaign," is authored by Logan Pearce from the Department of Astronomy at the University of Michigan and Ewan Douglas from the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. The pair lay out the scientific case for reflected starlight observations and present a carefully curated list of 27 target exoplanets.
"Direct detection and characterization of exoplanet atmospheres via reflected starlight enables probes of composition of mature exoplanet systems (since flux is decoupled from age) at closer separations than via thermal emission (due to observations in visible wavelengths), and even probes of biosignatures." — Pearce & Douglas, 2026
Why Reflected Starlight Changes Everything
To appreciate the significance of reflected starlight observations, it helps to understand the current state of exoplanet direct imaging. Every exoplanet directly imaged to date has been detected through its own self-luminous thermal emission — the residual heat left over from the energy of planetary formation. Young, hot, massive gas giants glow brightly in the infrared, making them tractable targets for instruments like the SPHERE instrument on the Very Large Telescope or the GPI on Gemini. However, as planets age, they cool and fade, becoming increasingly difficult to detect through their thermal glow alone.
Reflected starlight sidesteps this limitation entirely. A planet's brightness in reflected light depends not on its age or internal heat, but on its size, reflectivity (albedo), and distance from its host star. This means that older, colder planets — the kinds of mature worlds most analogous to the gas giants in our own Solar System — become accessible for the first time through direct imaging. As Pearce and Douglas note:
"To date all exoplanets have been imaged through their self-luminous thermal emission, but direct, spatially resolved imaging of planets via reflected starlight is on the near horizon. Reflected light imaging enables detection and characterization of planets decoupled from age, and the smaller resolution limits provided by imaging shorter wavelengths (∼0.5–2μm), where the star luminosity peaks, allows access to closer-in planets compared to thermal emission."
This last point — access to closer orbital separations — is equally critical. Shorter wavelengths provide better angular resolution relative to a given telescope aperture, meaning Lazuli's ESC can resolve planets that orbit much closer to their stars than an equivalent infrared instrument could. Planets in closer orbits receive more stellar flux and therefore reflect more light, making them brighter targets. The combination of these effects opens a genuinely new window on planetary demographics.
The Challenge of Extreme Contrasts
Reflected starlight detection is not without formidable technical challenges. The contrast ratio between a star and a planet in reflected visible light is staggering — typically somewhere between 10−7 and 10−9. In practical terms, this means detecting a planet that is between ten million and one billion times fainter than its host star, all while the two are separated by only a fraction of an arcsecond on the sky. Achieving this requires not only a state-of-the-art coronagraph, but also sophisticated wavefront sensing and control systems to suppress the inevitable optical aberrations that would otherwise drown out the planetary signal.
The consequence of these extreme contrasts is that exposure times are correspondingly long — potentially tens to hundreds of hours per target. This makes untargeted, survey-style observations impractical for a 3-meter class observatory. Pearce and Douglas address this challenge directly:
"The high contrasts involved in reflected light detection and subsequent long exposure times make uninformed searches challenging for a 3m class observatory. Campaign efficiency can be dramatically improved by targeting known planets and leveraging well constrained orbital priors in order to prioritize targets and time observations for the maximum likelihood of detection."
In other words, knowing exactly where a planet is in its orbit — and therefore where to look — is essential for making the most of precious observing time. This is why the 27 selected targets all share the quality of well-characterized orbital parameters, derived from decades of radial velocity and astrometric monitoring.
The 27 Target Worlds: A New Frontier in Planetary Demographics
The curated target list spans an impressive range of planetary ages and temperatures, deliberately probing regimes that have been inaccessible to previous direct-imaging campaigns. All 27 targets are giant exoplanets, broadly comparable to Jupiter or Saturn in mass, orbiting a diverse host star population. An analysis of the host star properties using a Gaia color-magnitude diagram reveals that the sample spans a wide range of spectral types and effective temperatures, with only a single M-dwarf host star represented — reflecting the observational challenges of imaging planets around intrinsically faint red stars, despite their astrophysical interest.
Among the 27 targets, several stand out for their individual scientific interest:
- 55 Cancri d — A remarkable Jupiter analog orbiting one of the nearest and brightest exoplanet host stars in the sky. Its well-studied multi-planet system, which also includes the famous super-Earth 55 Cancri e, makes it a high-priority target for comparative planetology.
- HD 181433 d — Distinguished by its highly eccentric orbit, this giant planet is part of a dynamically rich system that also harbors an ultra-short period super-Earth. Its eccentric trajectory means that its reflected light brightness varies dramatically over the course of its orbit, creating optimal windows for detection.
- β Pictoris b (Beta Pictoris b) — Perhaps the most storied planet on the list, β Pic b was among the first exoplanets ever directly imaged, initially detected in 2008. It orbits within the spectacular debris disk of its young host star — a system that has become a canonical laboratory for studying planetary system formation. Its inclusion in the ESC target list will allow, for the first time, a reflected-light characterization of this iconic world, providing atmospheric insights unavailable from thermal emission measurements alone.
The full target list is designed not only to maximize individual scientific returns, but also to generate powerful synergies with other next-generation observatories. Several of the 27 worlds will also be accessible to the ELT's METIS thermal imager on the Extremely Large Telescope and to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's coronagraphic instrument. Multi-platform observations spanning both reflected light and thermal emission will enable far more comprehensive atmospheric characterizations than any single observatory could achieve alone, potentially revealing cloud structures, chemical abundances, and even hints of atmospheric dynamics.
The Biosignature Horizon
Beyond the immediate goal of characterizing giant planet atmospheres, the reflected starlight technique pioneered by the ESC has profound long-term implications for the search for life beyond Earth. Biosignature gases — molecules whose presence in a planetary atmosphere might indicate biological activity, such as oxygen, ozone, and methane in specific combinations — are detectable only in reflected starlight spectra, not in thermal emission. While the ESC will be studying giant planets rather than potentially habitable rocky worlds, the instrument represents a critical technological and scientific stepping stone toward future missions specifically designed for biosignature searches around Earth-sized planets.
As Pearce and Douglas note, the ability to probe "composition of mature exoplanet systems" and even "biosignatures" through reflected starlight is one of the defining scientific motivations for the entire campaign. Each successful characterization of a giant planet atmosphere builds the physical and chemical baseline needed to interpret future observations of smaller, potentially habitable worlds.
Looking Ahead
The arrival of the Lazuli Space Telescope on the astronomical scene before 2029 will mark a genuine inflection point — not only for exoplanet science, but for the broader question of how humanity chooses to explore the cosmos. The telescope's private ownership model is unprecedented, and the astronomical community will be watching closely to see how it shapes the telescope's scientific priorities, data access policies, and long-term legacy.
What is already clear, however, is that the science case is compelling. As Pearce and Douglas conclude:
"Our target list expands direct imaging of gas giant planets into regimes colder than previously imaged, probing mature exoplanet systems, with some overlap with Roman CGI and ELT-METIS imaging, providing more comprehensive atmosphere characterization through synergies with those platform capabilities."
In an era defined by an ever-expanding roster of known exoplanets — now numbering more than 5,700 confirmed worlds according to the NASA Exoplanet Archive — the ability to directly see and chemically fingerprint those planets represents the next great leap. The Lazuli Space Telescope and its ExtraSolar Coronagraph may well deliver that leap, opening a reflected-light window onto distant worlds that has, until now, remained firmly shut.
