Superconducting camera can spot exoplanets

Los Angeles, April 18: Scientists have developed the world’s largest superconducting camera that can spot planets around stars near our solar system.

Distinguishing that planet’s light from its star can be problematic, researchers said.

The team from California Institute of Technology and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the US created a device named DARKNESS ( the DARK- speckle Nearinfrared Energy- resolved Super conducting Spectrophotometer ), the first 10,000- pixel integral field spectrograph designed to overcome the limitations of traditional semiconductor detectors.

It employs Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors that, in conjunction with a large telescope and an adaptive optics system, enable direct imaging of planets around nearby stars.

“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,” said Benjamin Mazin, from University of California, Santa Barbara in the US. Darkness is an attempt to overcome some of the technical barriers to detecting planets. It can take the equivalent of thousands of frames per second without any read noise or dark current, which are among the primary sources of error in other instruments.

It also 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.