DARKNESS, an integral field spectrograph, could be used by a ground telescope to directly image exoplanets:
The DARKNESS, shorthand for "Dark-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer" reads noise and dark current, small electric currents that flow through photosensitive devices.
Together, these elements can force errors in a variety of instruments, but DARKNESS, which UC Berkeley calls the "world's largest and most advanced superconducting camera," snaps thousands of frames-per-second without being affected by either. With this accuracy, scientists can determine the wavelength and arrival time of every single photon it views.
"This technology will lower the contrast floor so that we can detect fainter planets, says DARKNESS scientist Dimitri Mawet of the California Institute of Technology in a press statement. "We hope to approach the photon noise limit, which will give us contrast ratios close to 10-8, allowing us to see planets 100 million times fainter than the star. At those contrast levels, we can see some planets in reflected light, which opens up a whole new domain of planets to explore. The really exciting thing is that this is a technology pathfinder for the next generation of telescopes."
[...] According to the team's paper [DOI: 10.1088/1538-3873/aab5e7] [DX], DARKNESS is "the first of several planned integral field spectrographs." "Our hope is that one day we will be able to build an instrument for the Thirty Meter Telescope planned for Mauna Kea on the island of Hawaii or La Palma," says UC Santa Barbara physicist and team leader Ben Mazin. "With that, we'll be able to take pictures of planets in the habitable zones of nearby low mass stars and look for life in their atmospheres."
Also at Astronomy Now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:17AM
By contrast ratio of "10-8" they mean 10⁸ to 1. Welcome to the unicode era. It works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @06:45AM (1 child)
April 1 is over.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday April 18 2018, @12:01PM
It's never over for ignorant Anonymous Cowards:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_current_(physics) [wikipedia.org]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday April 18 2018, @03:05PM
The ultimate location is Mauna Kea, and the Canaries? Except for being limited to half the sky, the interior of Antarctica is an excellent location for telescopes-- high and very dry, and while not all that accessible, an order of magnitude more accessible than space. But I suppose that if this is primarily for planet hunting, and that the plane of the solar system is fairly close to the plane of the galaxy, a location near the equator is best.
And that's only if putting the telescope in space is not doable. We have lots of telescopes in space. Today (April 18, 2018) TESS will be launched, in 8 hours.
Anyway, very cool that it will actually be possible to directly image exoplanets. It's hard enough seeing Pluto from Earth. The Hubble simply couldn't resolve more than a few pixels. Astounding that it's possible to see planets that are over 1000 times farther away. And if DARKNESS can do that, seems it should be able to give us a pretty good initial look at the far closer Planet 9 if and when it is found. I may get to see Planet 9 in my lifetime, if mission planners get busy designing a probe that needs only 10 years to reach it, and Planet 9 is found in the next 5 years, and the mission is launched soon after the discovery. Possible to learn a lot about Planet 9 from Earth based observation, but that still can't compare to an up close view.