Ultra-Sensitive Camera To Measure Exoplanet Sizes 62
Roland Piquepaille writes "US astronomers and engineers have built a new camera to precisely measure the size of planets moving around distant stars. This camera has been dubbed OPTIC — short for 'Orthogonal Parallel Transfer Imaging Camera.' According to the research team, it is 'so sensitive that it could detect the passage of a moth in front of a lit window from a distance of 1,000 miles.' I'm not sure if this analogy is right, but the team said it was able to precisely define the size of a planet called WASP-10b which is orbiting around the star WASP-10, about 300 light-years from Earth."
Split infinitives are perfectly legal (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, in American English [nytimes.com] as well.
And if they are used to change the emphasis in a phrase, they often are very useful too. They can even allow for improved clarity.
So just stop to stupidly impose latin grammar rules and conventions on another language.
By the way: Ending sentences with prepositions [trinicenter.com] is generally OK as well.
Re:doesn't sound very impressive (Score:2, Informative)
In any case, it's not more sensitive than the Hubble apparently, so it's probably not going to make any breakthrough discoveries.
Nowadays the quality of images is better from earth than from the HST. Although there is the atmosphere, on places with extremely low humidity like Mauna Kea large telescopes can be built. The HST is quite a small telescope, and with corrections of the atmosphere (like adaptive optics, lucky imaging, ...) the result is better from earth.
Other than that, I believe the scientists there when they say, they improved the precision by a factor of 2-3.
Re:doesn't sound very impressive (Score:4, Informative)
It measures light to a precision of one part in 2,000
So that's 11 bits of intensity information? Most professional camera CCD's are 12 bits per color. Some are 14 bits per color. Doesn't sound very impressive. And with multiple exposures, it should be possible to get a much higher resolution.
14 bits is all nice and good if your light source is the local star and you can saturate your CCD within milliseconds.
We're measuring starlight here, at maybe 10 orders of magnitude less light. Try getting 14-bit resolution at that level without drowning in noise.
A couple corrections (from someone involved*) (Score:3, Informative)
OPTIC is not exactly a new camera, nor was it purpose-built for this. It's about four years old, and was the prototype camera for John Tonry's OTCCD (Orthogonal Transfer CCD) chips, which are now better known as the chips inside Pan-STARRS' gigapixel camera, I think. The OTCCDs have some in-chip guiding capabilities, which are kinda neat. If I recall, OPTIC spends half the year at (but not always on) the UH 2.2-meter (where I'm an operator) and half the year at WIYN.
Because OPTIC works somewhat differently than our other cameras, it doesn't exactly have a whole lot of users. John Johnson came up with the idea of using it to do light curves of transiting planets, and it turned out to work pretty well, to the point that he and his collaborators (including a couple summer REU students from the mainland) were able to get the first full-transit light curves of some particular planets.
(*involved as in, I was operating the scope that night in August and got to see those light curves in "real time." Fortunately, being thanked at the end of a scientific paper preprint earns me geek cred with my 9-year-old. ;)