SoylentNews

takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

DARKNESS, an integral field spectrograph [wikipedia.org], could be used by a ground telescope to directly image exoplanets [popularmechanics.com]:

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 [ucsb.edu]. "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 [iop.org] [DOI: 10.1088/1538-3873/aab5e7] [DX [doi.org]], 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 [astronomynow.com].

Original Submission