One of the more annoying limiting factors in doing a lot of science is our atmosphere. Place-to-place variations in temperature, humidity, and other factors lead to the twinkling of stars that we enjoy as children and hate as astronomers. 

New technology is allowing us to overcome this twinkling in ever more impressive ways, and a recent test of a laser “phase stabilization” technology allowed Australian researchers to correct for atmospheric turbulence in three dimensions. This was largely the effort of Ph.D. student Benjamin Dix-Matthews, who explains that the technology allowed them “to send highly-stable laser signals through the atmosphere while retaining the quality of the original signal. … It’s as if the moving atmosphere has been removed and doesn’t exist.”

This kind of stabilization, once it can be deployed on a regular basis, will allow new kinds of physics experiments to be done. This story caught my attention because it will allow us to actually measure how the ticking of time varies from the surface of our Earth to different orbits due to the effects of Einstein’s relativity. 

Beyond enabling new science, these lasers will also be useful for high-speed data transmission. While today’s radio waves travel at the same speed of light as these lasers, the lasers can support higher data densities, allowing more information to flow per minute and microsecond. According to co-author Sascha Schchediwy: The next generation of big data-gathering satellites would be able to get critical information to the ground faster. 

This new technology was developed to allow the upcoming Square Kilometer Array to synchronize signals between dishes, but it once again has shown us that the technology we need to do astronomy can lead to improvements in our fundamental understanding of the universe and breakthroughs in how we communicate around the world. As a reminder, it was researchers in Australia who figured out how to invent wifi while working on radio astronomy research.

More Information

ICRAR press release

“Point-to-point stabilized optical frequency transfer with active optics,” Benjamin P. Dix-Matthews et al., 2021 January 22, Nature Communications