The world's largest 'super' camera to hunt for exoplanets

An international research group has designed a high-end camera up to 10,000 pixels to search for exoplanets that traditional semiconductor detectors cannot capture.

Usually Earth-like exoplanets are quite close to the host star and their photography is extremely difficult because the host star is several times brighter than these planets.

However, this will no longer be an obstacle in the hunt for alien planets. Recently, an international research group has designed a high-end 10,000-pixel camera that can capture images of extrasolar planets more clearly.

DARKNESS is a spectrum camera that uses microwave inductance sensors.

Considered the world's largest and most advanced camera, DARKNESS is responsible for filtering the dim light of stars, helping the exoplanets to "show" in detail.

DARKNESS is a spectrum camera that uses microwave inductance sensors. This allows it to determine the wavelength and arrival time of individual photons, meaning planets can be filtered out from a noise background more clearly.

Along with that, the device can handle the "distortion" situation when light passes through the Earth's atmosphere, giving the image a higher contrast.

"This technology will help reduce the contrast floor to detect darker planets ," said team member Dimitri Mawet. 'Approaching the limit of light interference will produce a contrast ratio of nearly 10-8 to see faint planets than stars up to 100 million times. Darkness will be the pioneering technology for the next generation of telescopes. '

The purpose of this whole process is to clean up the disturbed atmosphere, a common phenomenon that we can easily see on clear, bright nights. Cleaning up DARKNESS's sparkles will help scientists see a stronger contrast between a planet and its star.

Alien Kepler-186f.(Photo: NASA Ames / JPL-Caltech / T. Pyle).

DARKNESS is designed for Hale telescopes with large reflector diameters up to 5.1 m at Palomar observatory near San Diego (USA). DARKNESS has been tested four times by the research team at Palomar, and will continue to be tested in May for the larger-scale DARKNESS design project.

"DARKNESS is an important step in our long-term goal. This is a premise to build a camera for the Thirty Meter telescope that can be located at Mauna Kea (Hawaii) or La Palma, the goal is to take pictures of the surrounding planets of light-weight stars and seek life there, 'said lead researcher Ben Mazin.