A UCLA-led team has captured the most detailed image ever of a disk around the distant star beta Canis Minoris using a innovative photonic lantern on a single telescope. This breakthrough reveals hidden structures without needing multiple telescopes. The discovery uncovers a lopsided hydrogen disk 162 light-years away.
Astronomers have long relied on linking multiple telescopes to obtain the sharpest images of distant celestial objects, but a new technique has shattered that limitation. Using the Subaru Telescope in Hawai'i, a team led by researchers from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) employed a photonic lantern device to image the disk surrounding beta Canis Minoris (β CMi), a star about 162 light-years away in the constellation Canis Minor.
The photonic lantern, developed by collaborators including the University of Sydney and the University of Central Florida, splits incoming starlight into multiple channels based on wavefront patterns and colors. This allows advanced computational methods to reconstruct high-resolution images that capture subtle details otherwise lost. The device is part of the FIRST-PL instrument on the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics system, operated by Japan's National Astronomical Observatory.
"In astronomy, the sharpest image details are usually obtained by linking telescopes together. But we did it with a single telescope by feeding its light into a specially designed optical fiber, called a photonic lantern," said Yoo Jung Kim, a UCLA doctoral candidate and lead author of the study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
The observation revealed a fast-spinning hydrogen disk around β CMi, with the side rotating toward Earth appearing bluer due to the Doppler effect. Researchers measured color-based position shifts with five times greater precision than before, confirming the disk's rotation and discovering its unexpected lopsided asymmetry. "We were not expecting to detect an asymmetry like this, and it will be a task for the astrophysicists modeling these systems to explain its presence," Kim added.
Atmospheric turbulence posed a challenge, addressed through adaptive optics and new data processing techniques developed by Kim. This method pushes beyond the diffraction limit of traditional imaging, enabling clearer views of smaller, fainter, and more distant objects.
The international collaboration includes institutions such as the University of Hawai'i, California Institute of Technology, Paris Observatory, and others. "This work demonstrates the potential of photonic technologies to enable new kinds of measurement in astronomy," said Nemanja Jovanovic of Caltech. The breakthrough could transform studies of stars, planets, and cosmic structures.