Researchers have recently utilized skipper charge-coupled devices on the 4.1-meter Southern Astrophysical Research Telescope to capture the first astronomical spectrum using this technology.
The results were presented on June 16 at the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation meeting in Japan by Edgar Marrufo Villalpando, a physics PhD candidate at the“This is a major milestone for skipper-CCD technology,” said Alex Drlica-Wagner, a cosmologist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory who led the project.
On March 31 and April 9, the researchers used skipper CCDs in the SOAR Integral Field Spectrograph 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.
“Many decades have passed since the skipper was born, so I was surprised to see the technology come to life again,” said Jim Janesick, inventor of the skipper CCD and a distinguished engineer at SRI International, a research institute based in California. “The noise results are amazing! I fell off my seat when I saw the very clean sub-electron noise data.”With the first successful demonstration of skipper-CCD technology for astrophysics, scientists are already working to improve it.
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