World's 'Most Advanced' Camera Will Hunt for Alien Worlds

A new type of camera developed by U.S. researchers will allow astronomers to directly image planets around nearby stars in the search for another Earth.

The camera, called DARKNESS (the DARK-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer), relies on extremely sensitive superconductor detectors to gather light from distant worlds.

Source: World's 'Most Advanced' Camera Will Hunt for Alien Worlds

The interesting aspect of this new approach is to actually analyze the reflected light from that planet to see the light spectrum. Analysis of the spectrum will help reveal if alien life is on that planet if certain gasses are present.

Later this year, the researchers plan to deploy an even larger, 20,000-pixel camera on an 8-m (26 feet) telescope at Mauna Kea in Hawaii.

"Going from a 5-m to an 8-m telescope is a big improvement in what you can see," said Mazin. "Mauna Kea is the best site in the world for this kind of work, and we hope that the 8-m telescope in combination with a very powerful adaptive optic system will allow us to start finding more planets and for the first time start seeing planets in reflected light."

Mazin said he hopes the technology will be used in the future 30-m (98 feet) telescopes, which will be powerful enough to read the spectrum of the reflected light from exoplanets around nearby stars and look for signatures of life in those worlds' atmospheres.

a reply to: Krakatoa

So many jokes, so little time.

As long as it covers the entire spectrum then we can be cool with that-instead of watching Into Darkness.

a reply to: Krakatoa

I think will be great! Can’t wait to see some pictures and maybe we will get lucky and they will have a live feed each night!


But there is something that I have always wanted to know. Is poop reflective in space?

It may want to take a look on Earth

That's very cool, I hope many amateur astronomers will take advantage of this thing.

Astronomy and astrophysics is actually all about studying a point of light (asteroid, comet, moon, planet, or a star) and using spectroscopy to identify its components. Astronomers spend very little time actually looking through a telescope, and much more time at their computers, using maths, graphs, and equations to figure stuff out.

Every now and again, we do end up with some gorgeous images, though.