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Super Sensitive Sensor Sees What You Can’t

A team of engineers at Dartmouth College has invented a semiconductor chip that could someday give the camera in your phone the kind of vision even a superhero would envy.

The new technology comes from Eric Fossum, a professor of engineering and his colleagues at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering.

This isn’t the first imaging technology Fossum has worked on. Twenty-five years ago, while working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he invented CMOS image sensor technology.

“There’s about 4 billion cameras made every year with that CMOS image sensor technology,” Fossum says.

The CMOS sensor chip turns light into electrical signals that can be processed to form digital images.

Fossum calls his new technology QIS, for Quanta Image Sensor. Instead of pixels, QIS chips have what Fossum and his colleagues call “jots.” Each jot can detect a single particle of light, called a photon.

“What this chip can do because it’s sensitive to single photons is it can see in the dimmest possible light,” Fossum says.

This is a sample photo taken with the 1-megapixel Quanta Image Sensor. Instead of pixels, QIS chips have what researchers call “jots.” Each jot can detect a single particle of light. Jiaju Ma

all i ever think about is how birds are dinosaurs 

More dog snaps

By John Noe

What caused this outburst of this star named V838 Mon? For reasons unknown, this star’s outer surface suddenly greatly expanded with the result that it became the brightest star in the entire Milky Way Galaxy in January 2002. Then, just as suddenly, it faded. A stellar flash like this had never been seen before – supernovas and novas expel matter out into space.

Although the V838 Mon flash appears to expel material into space, what is seen in the above GIF from the Hubble Space Telescope is actually an outwardly moving light echo of the bright flash.

In a light echo, light from the flash is reflected by successively more distant rings in the complex array of ambient interstellar dust that already surrounded the star. V838 Mon lies about 20,000 light years away toward the constellation of the unicorn (Monoceros), while the light echo above spans about six light years in diameter.

Credit: NASA, ESA

To discover more, visit: https://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_2472.html

Inside the Flame Nebula

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