An international team of physicists and astronomers has created what’s being billed as the world’s most advanced camera.
Known as Darkness (for Dark-speckle Near-infrared Energy-resolved Superconducting Spectrophotometer), the suitcase-sized device is designed not for taking big panoramas or snapping selfies but for spotting planets around nearby stars — and enhancing the search for alien life.
It’s proven hard for Earth-based observatories to detect exoplanets both because light from celestial objects becomes distorted as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere and because the light that reaches us from exoplanets is extremely faint compared to that from their host [...]