{"id":616252,"date":"2026-09-30T10:28:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T10:28:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616252\/"},"modified":"2026-09-30T10:28:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-30T10:28:08","slug":"why-astronomers-make-fake-stars-with-huge-lasers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/616252\/","title":{"rendered":"Why astronomers make fake stars with huge lasers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Paragraph-styles__ParagraphStyled-sc-ffb5f5ba-0 fqhmpl\">For adaptive optics to work, though, astronomers need a star as a reference point \u2013 a fixed point in the sky. And crucially, it needs to be bright. Why? &#8220;Imagine that you&#8217;re listening to a song, and you want to get the melody,&#8221; explains Bayo. &#8220;If the volume is low; if there&#8217;s more noise, or you only hear high or low pitch, then you may not be able to tell which song it is.&#8221; It&#8217;s the same with stars; a bright star provides more information to help correct the atmospheric distortion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For adaptive optics to work, though, astronomers need a star as a reference point \u2013 a fixed point&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616253,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-616252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616252\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}