Hot pixel mystery

摘要

Something strange is killing off pixels in the detectors of a multi-billion-dollar space telescope. NASA's ultra-sensitive James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is supposed to launch in 2014 and glimpse the universe's first stars and galaxies. But in December Marcia Rieke of the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues found that roughly 2 per cent of pixels in a detector destined for JWST's Near Infrared Camera were transmitting signals although no light was hitting them, four times as many "hot pixels" as expected.