- 4553 - NEW TELESCOPES - CCD's to improve sensitivity? - Scientists have used sensitive CCDs on a telescope to study the night sky. Berkeley Lab designed and processed the ultra-low-noise detectors, which could improve future experiments to understand our universe.
---------------------------------- 4553
- NEW TELESCOPES
- CCD's to improve sensitivity?
-
- Using an instrument on the 4.1-meter
Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope, researchers obtained the
first astronomical spectrum using skipper charge-coupled devices (CCDs).
“Skipper CCDs” can get down to very low noise levels, which helps astronomers
see distant galaxies.
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- On March 31 and April 9, 2021, researchers
used skipper CCDs to collect astronomical spectra from a galaxy cluster, two
distant quasars, a galaxy with bright emission lines, and a star that is
potentially associated with a dark-matter-dominated ultra-faint galaxy.
-
- In a first for astrophysical CCD
observations, they achieved sub-electron readout noise and counted individual
photons at optical wavelengths. CCDs
were invented in the United States in 1969, and forty years later scientists
were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their achievement.
-
- The devices are two-dimensional arrays of
light-sensitive pixels that convert incoming photons into electrons.
Conventional CCDs are the image sensors first used in digital cameras, and they
remain the standard for many scientific imaging applications, such as
astronomy, though their precision is limited by electronic noise.
-
- Cosmologists seek to understand the
mysterious natures of dark matter and dark energy by studying the distributions
of stars and galaxies. To do this, they need advanced technology that can see
fainter, more distant astronomical objects with as little noise as possible.
-
- Existing CCD technology can make these
measurements but take a long time or are less efficient. So, astrophysicists
must either increase the signal, by investing more time on the world’s largest
telescopes, or decrease the electronic noise.
-
- Skipper CCDs were introduced in 1990 to
reduce electronic noise to levels that allow the measurement of individual
photons. They do this by taking multiple measurements of interesting pixels and
skipping the rest. This strategy enables skipper CCDs to increase the precision
of measurements in interesting regions of the image while reducing total
readout time.
-
- In 2017, scientists pioneered the use of
skipper CCDs for dark matter experiments such as SENSEI and OSCURA, but today’s
presentation showed the first time the technology was used to observe the night
sky and collect astronomical data.
-
- What’s incredible is that these photons
traveled to our detectors from objects billions of light-years away, and we
could measure each one individually.
-
- With the first successful demonstration of
skipper-CCD technology for astrophysics, scientists are already working to
improve it. The next generation of skipper CCDs, developed by Berkeley Lab and
Fermilab, is 16 times faster than current devices.
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-
September 11, 2024 NEW
TELESCOPES - CCD's
to improve sensitivity? 4553
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--------------------- --- Thursday, September 12,
2024
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