Italian QUantum Eye on Gemini South Sees First Light

March 19, 2025

New visiting instrument captures unprecedented view of the Crab Pulsar with incredible detail and time-resolution

Italian QUantum Eye on Gemini South Sees First Light

The Italian QUantum Eye (IQUEYE), a new visiting instrument at Gemini South, one half of the International Gemini Observatory, partly funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and operated by NSF NOIRLab, has seen first light. IQUEYE is an extremely powerful photometer with superb potential for observing astronomical objects that vary in time at fast rates, such as pulsars, blazars, and magnetars.

Photometers allow astronomers to observe distant objects in the Universe by collecting the stream of photons (the fundamental particle of light) emitted by the object. What sets IQUEYE apart from other photometers is that it detects one single photon at a time. As the photons flow in, each one is individually tagged with its arrival time. This single photon-counting method allows IQUEYE to make precise time measurements that are accurate to as little as 0.5 nanoseconds.

The instrument team, led by Tomás Cassanelli (Universidad de Chile), Giampiero Naletto (University of Padova), and Luca Zampieri (National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF)), delivered IQUEYE to Gemini South in early February 2025 [1]. During the commissioning and science observations, IQUEYE saw first light as it observed the Crab Pulsar. Reduction and analysis of IQUEYE datasets takes time, but even in the preliminary analysis of the first-light observations the data revealed detailed structures in the signal, showing crisp spikes from the pulsar’s light with exceptionally low levels of noise.

The Crab Pulsar is one of the brightest and best-documented pulsar sources, making it the ideal first-light target for IQUEYE. While other telescopes have observed the Crab Pulsar at various wavelengths (X-ray, radio, optical), this is the first time it has been observed with such a high time resolution and level of detail and sensitivity.

Mounted on Gemini South, IQUEYE will observe in the visible spectrum. Its world-class time accuracy will provide complementary data to other telescopes observing the same time-domain events in other wavelengths of light. For example, this ability could inform astronomers about the origin of fast radio bursts (FRB), a process not yet understood. These fleeting bursts of light can last anywhere from a fraction of a millisecond to three seconds. With IQUEYE, astronomers will be able to, for the first time ever at deep sensitivity levels, compare what an FRB looks like in the radio versus in the visible at extremely precise moments in time.

While IQUEYE has operated on other telescopes in the past, this will be the first time that its unprecedented time resolution capabilities have been used with a telescope as optically powerful as Gemini South. This will allow the instrument to observe deeper into space with more sensitivity than ever before, helping astronomers constrain the physical properties of targets and allow them to make important strides in understanding the statistics of the sky.

IQUEYE is currently a visiting instrument at Gemini South. Gemini staff are in the process of discussing how to offer the instrument to the community for coming years.

Notes

[1] The Gemini Development group, including Hwihyun Kim (Gemini Visiting Instrument Program Manager), Ruben Diaz (Head of Gemini Instrumentation), and Andreas Seifarht (Gemini Associate Director for Development), evaluated the team's proposal and supported the IQUEYE team over the past year to bring the instrument to Gemini South.

More information

NSF NOIRLab, the U.S. National Science Foundation center for ground-based optical-infrared astronomy, operates the International Gemini Observatory (a facility of NSF, NRC–Canada, ANID–Chile, MCTIC–Brazil, MINCyT–Argentina, and KASI–Republic of Korea), NSF Kitt Peak National Observatory (KPNO), NSF Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC), and NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory (in cooperation with DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory). It is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with NSF and is headquartered in Tucson, Arizona.

The scientific community is honored to have the opportunity to conduct astronomical research on I’oligam Du’ag (Kitt Peak) in Arizona, on Maunakea in Hawai‘i, and on Cerro Tololo and Cerro Pachón in Chile. We recognize and acknowledge the very significant cultural role and reverence of I’oligam Du’ag to the Tohono O’odham Nation, and Maunakea to the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) community.