麻豆淫院

A pair of Sydney Ph.D. students helped sharpen the view of humanity's most powerful space observatory鈥攚ithout leaving Earth. As an indelible reminder of this thrilling result, Louis Desdoigts, now a postdoctoral researcher at Leiden in the Netherlands, and his colleague Max Charles, had tattoos of the instrument their work has repaired inked on their arms.

This technical breakthrough saw University of Sydney researchers develop a software fix that corrected blurring in images made by NASA's multibillion-dollar James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), restoring crisp performance to one of its vital scientific instruments鈥攁ll without the need for a space mission or astronaut repair.

The achievement builds on the only piece of Australian-designed hardware on the JWST鈥攖he Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI)鈥攃reated by Professor Peter Tuthill from the University of Sydney's School of 麻豆淫院ics and Sydney Institute for Astronomy. The AMI lets astronomers to take ultra-high-resolution images of stars and exoplanets by combining light from multiple patches on the telescope's main mirror, a technique known as interferometry.

However, after JWST began operations, scientists discovered that AMI's performance was being degraded by subtle electronic distortions in its infrared camera detector. These were injecting fuzziness into recovered images鈥攁 problem reminiscent of the predecessor to JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope's early "blurry vision" after launch, which famously required a space shuttle mission and astronaut spacewalks to correct.

Rather than designing a new lens or mounting such a costly rescue mission, Ph.D. students Louis Desdoigts and Max Charles from Professor Tuthill's group, also working with Associate Professor Ben Pope (at Macquarie University), created a data-driven, software-only calibration system that fixed the focus from the ground.

Their system, called AMIGO (Aperture Masking Interferometry Generative Observations), uses advanced simulations and neural networks to model how the telescope's optics and electronics behave in space. By understanding an imperfection in which electrical charge bleeds over into neighboring pixels, a process known as the brighter-fatter effect, the team developed algorithms that "de-blurred" the images and restored AMI's full sensitivity.

"Instead of sending astronauts to bolt on new parts, they managed to fix things with code," Professor Tuthill said. "It's a brilliant example of how Australian innovation can make a global impact in space science."

The fix has produced spectacular . With AMIGO, the James Webb Space Telescope has achieved sharper-than-ever detections of faint celestial objects鈥攊ncluding the direct imaging of a dim exoplanet and a red-brown dwarf orbiting the nearby star HD 206893, about 133 light years from Earth.

A companion led by Max Charles, a Ph.D. student at Sydney, has demonstrated AMI's renewed focus by capturing high-resolution images of a black hole jet, the volcanic surface of one of Jupiter's moons (Io) and the dusty stellar winds of WR 137鈥攑ushing the boundaries of JWST's capabilities.

"This work brings JWST's vision into even sharper focus," Dr. Desdoigts said. "It's incredibly rewarding to see a software solution extend the telescope's scientific reach鈥攁nd to know it was possible without ever leaving the lab."

Dr. Desdoigts has now landed a postdoctoral research position at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

Both studies have been published on the pre-print server arXiv. Dr. Desdoigts's paper has been peer-reviewed and will shortly be published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia. This release coincides with the of James Webb Space Telescope General Observer, Survey and Archival Research programs.

Associate Professor Benjamin Pope, who will present these findings at on Friday, and said the research team was keen to get the new code into the hands of researchers working on JWST as soon as possible.