Amit Kumar

Hunting for a single glowing spot in a dark sample is like trying to find a needle in a haystack: the microscope beam crawls line by line, wasting time and light. Physicists replaced this slow sweep with random light patterns. The sample is illuminated with a broad field, but each time with a new pattern of bright and dark patches, as if random shadows from a grid were projected onto it.

A short laser pulse hits an iodine molecule, and its atoms start to vibrate like a ball on a spring. Scientists track these vibrations with a second, broadband pulse that captures a spectrum at different moments in time. It turns out that vibrations in the excited B state quickly shift in frequency and fade out, and then vibrations appear in the A state.

When a star ventures too close to a supermassive black hole, a cosmic requiem plays out — a tidal disruption event. Thanks to photometry and spectroscopy, astronomers discern every instrument in this orchestra.