By Elton Gomes
In a significant breakthrough, planets in our solar system’s vicinity can now be photographedwhich will help scientists study exoplanets, and determine whether they are habitable.
Scientists have developed the world’s largest superconducting camera, which can be used to spot exoplanetsrocky planets roughly the size of Earthlocated close to the stars that reside in our solar system, as per media reports.
Benjamin Mazin, a physicist from University of California, Santa Barbara, is leading an international team, to develop a new, advanced instrument to spot such planets. This instrument, named DARKNESS, or DARK-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer, is the first 10,000 pixel spectrograph.
Hello DARKNESS: Physicists team up with astronomers to commission the most advanced camera in the world https://t.co/BCp8PvToYD pic.twitter.com/PYvcy7mxef
Axel Gaziano (@axelgaziano) April 20, 2018
Here’s what happened
Mazin told Motherboard that spotting small exoplanets is currently a challenge for astronomers. Just as the planets in our solar system orbit a bright starthe sunexoplanets located outside the solar system also generally orbit a star. However, in the case of small exoplanets, which are located close to their host stars, the excess light from the host stars often wash out any images that attempt to capture the alien planets. In other words, these exoplanets remain invisible from our vantage point on Earth.
Taking a picture of an exoplanet is extremely challenging because the star is much brighter than the planet, and the planet is very close to the star, Mazin said in a statement.
Phys.org reported that DARKNESS has been “designed to overcome the limitations of traditional semiconductor detectors.”
DARKNESS has been designed to overcome traditional barriers of exoplanet detection, and to boost the search for alien planets. The powerful camera can shoot the equivalent of thousands of frames per second, without registering any read noise or dark current, which are essentially small electric currents that flow through photosensitive devices, and are the dominant cause of errors.
Phys.org, the advanced camera “has the ability to determine the wavelength and arrival time of every photon. This time domain information is important for distinguishing a planet from scattered or refracted light called speckles.”
Scientists hope that DARKNESS will help spot planets that reflect light 100 million times dimmer than that of the stars they orbit.
How DARKNESS will work
DARKNESS will be integrated with the 200-inch Hale Telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California, and will serve as both a science camera, as well as a focal-plane-wave-front sensor, as reported by International Business Times.
DARKNESS will be capable of measuring the light from a star, and send a signal to a rubber mirror, which can change shape at a whopping 2,000 times in just a single second. This essentially helps clear the atmospheric distortion, which causes the star to twinkle by suppressing the starlight, and helps enable a higher contrast ratio between star and the planet orbiting it.
This technology will lower the contrast floor so that we can detect fainter planets, Mazin said. 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.
Why you should care
DARKNESS will be able to directly detect and capture images of alien planets that are located close to our solar system. The next-gen camera is expected to fuel monumental discoveries, leaving current and legacy telescope cameras in the dust. DARKNESS’s work will also boost research, and help us find out more about distant stars.
The late, celebrate theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking’s doomsday warning, which urged humanity to find another habitable planet within the coming century, appears to be looming ever closer. As our home planet continues to battle to survive under the onslaught of humanity’s ignorance and overindulgence, DARKNESS might just lead us to other planets, some of which, hopefully, may be hospitable to humans.