The telescopes used by MIT's optical and IR astronomers are the direct descendants of Galileo's, but have almost a million times more light gathering power. And instead of using their eyes, they use huge arrays of detectors not unlike those in cell phones, but cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures.

A nearby star is pummeling a companion planet with a barrage of X-rays a hundred thousand times more than the Earth receives from the Sun. Credit: NASA/CXC/NSF/IPAC/2MASS (see the 


