With this superconducting camera developed by scientists and engineers from the United States and Japan, scientists will now be able to directly image exoplanets and discs around bright stars. This superconducting camera is said to have a pixel count of 20,440, which makes it the world’s largest superconducting camera by that standard.
It is the first permanently deployed superconducting camera that operates in the optical and near-infrared spectrum, and it runs at a brisk 90 millikelvin – a touch over absolute zero.
Now part of the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawaii the MKID Exoplanet Camera is so named because it uses Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, which help overcome problems of scattered light associated with even the best adaptive optics systems.
MKIDs also can determine the energy of each photon that hits the detector – allowing scientists to determine a planet’s brightness – and they are fast, reading out data thousands of times per second.
There’s still work to be done, notably on the software and algorithms, but the developers, led by the University of California Santa Barbara, are confident of a bright future. The full story to date is told in a paper to be published in Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific.
Cool!
(Image Credit: UC Santa Barbara)