Benjamin Mazin
University of California-Santa Barbara, CA·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Are we alone? More than 5,000 planets around other stars (exoplanets) have been confirmed in the last two decades.
- Fields
Astronomy & Astrophysics
Physics
Engineering
- Topics
exoplanets
exoplanet imaging
high-contrast imaging
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2027
What they work on
- Upgrade the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC) on the Subaru Telescope with the team's latest Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors, raising spectral resolution at 1 micron from about R~5 to R~20.
- Increase the array fill factor of MEC's MKID detector, the share of its surface that collects light, so the camera captures more of each exoplanet's faint light.
- Operate the upgraded camera both as an integral field spectrograph and as a focal plane wavefront sensor in a multi-kHz feedback loop with SCExAO, the telescope's extreme adaptive optics system.
- Use SCExAO's 2,000-actuator deformable mirror for coherent differential imaging with the upgraded MEC to reach very high contrast at small angular separations from host stars.
More about the research
But finding a planet is very different from knowing whether it hosts life. Detecting life will require instruments that can measure spectral features, the fingerprints molecules leave in a planet's light. Possible signs of life include oxygen, water vapor, methane, ozone and maybe even chlorophyll. This project upgrades one such instrument, the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC), so it can study faint planets close to bright stars in more detail.
Why it matters
Finding signs of life on other worlds depends on measuring the light of planets that sit very close to much brighter stars. A sharper, more color-sensitive MKID camera paired with SCExAO could improve how exoplanets are detected and characterized. It is a step toward instruments that can look for molecules such as oxygen, water vapor and methane in planetary atmospheres. The project also trains students who could lead future astronomical instruments.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Carl Ferkinhoff
Winona State University, MN·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Upgrade the ZEUS-2 spectrometer into the ZEUS-3D imaging spectrometer by adding an image slicer, a K-mirror that steadies the image and a direct-absorbing KID (superconducting detector) array, for use on the APEX telescope.
Megan Reiter
Rice University, TX·Astronomy & Astrophysics·Early-career
Measure whether external photoevaporation, the stripping of a planet-forming disk by ultraviolet light from a nearby bright star, is a major influence on planet formation, using more than 100 hours of MUSE observations on the Very Large Telescope.
Clarence Chang
University of Chicago, IL·Astronomy & Astrophysics
Build COLIMATE, a 48-spectrometer millimeter-wave focal plane for the South Pole Telescope, with each pixel acting as its own on-chip spectrometer using superconducting kinetic inductance detectors.
The school
University of California-Santa Barbara: 17 labs on PI Pages, $303M a year on research, 403 research doctorates a year.
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