1. Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, California 91109, USA

Correspondence to: John T. Trauger¹ Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to J.T.T. (Email: john.trauger@jpl.nasa.gov).

The detection and characterization of an Earth-like planet orbiting a nearby star requires a telescope with an extraordinarily large contrast at small angular separations. At visible wavelengths, an Earth-like planet would be 1  10^-10 times fainter than the star at angular separations of typically 0.1 arcsecond or less^{1, 2}. There are several proposed space telescope systems that could, in principle, achieve this^{3, 4, 5, 6}. Here we report a laboratory experiment that reaches these limits. We have suppressed the diffracted and scattered light near a star-like source to a level of 6  10^-10 times the peak intensity in individual coronagraph images. In a series of such images, together with simple image processing, we have effectively reduced this to a residual noise level of about 0.1  10^-10. This demonstrates that a coronagraphic telescope in space could detect and spectroscopically characterize nearby exoplanetary systems, with the sensitivity to image an 'Earth-twin' orbiting a nearby star.

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