Starlight passing through the atmosphere and telescope optics shimmers like sunlight dancing on water. Hidden in that ripple are planets — faint sparks next to a blinding glare. To see them, you have to freeze the ripple: make the light as smooth as glass. But the ripple changes every millisecond, and conventional instruments can't keep up.
Previously, the approach was to take several consecutive images: one with the ripple, another with an added artificial ripple, and then use the difference to figure out how to remove it. It's like a photographer trying to photograph the bottom of a lake by tossing pebbles and comparing the ripples. Slow and imprecise.
The scientists tested the camera on a testbed at the University of Arizona. They aimed a laser simulating a star through a deformable mirror — a mirror that can change shape a thousand times per second. The camera took a single snapshot in 7.5 milliseconds and from it commanded the mirror how to bend to cancel the ripple. After ten such steps, the light speckles in the target region became twice as faint.
It's as if a swimmer, glancing at a single frame of ripples, instantly knew where to blow to smooth the water. But so far, the smooth patch covers only a third of the desired area. The reason: imprecise alignment of the two images and strong ripple from the mirror itself. The scientists know how to fix this: align the images more accurately and first flatten the large-scale waves.
In November 2026, the camera will be installed on a real telescope in Chile. If all goes well, such sensors will be placed on giant ground-based telescopes and on a space observatory that will search for signs of life in the atmospheres of distant planets. Then the ripple will finally freeze, and we'll see the bottom.
The 71-micrometer aperture for the reference beam, about the thickness of a human hair, was laser-cut into an aluminum plate measuring 2.54×2.54 cm.