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Nature Nanotechnology 3, 459–460 (1 August 2008) | doi:10.1038/nnano.2008.221

Instrumentation: Astronomers look to nanotechnology

Daniel E. Prober

Astronomers are greedy: they want to capture as much light as possible and extract every possible piece of information from even the faintest signal. A new detector developed by researchers in the US now offers the possibility of unprecedented sensitivity at far-infrared wavelengths — a region of the electromagnetic spectrum that contains a wealth of information about the most-distant, and therefore the oldest, objects in the universe.