Sydney students fix blurry JWST images with innovative software
Two innovative students from Sydney, Australia, have led a globally significant effort to sharpen the James Webb Space Telescope’s view. By developing and applying a powerful software solution, they addressed distortions in an onboard instrument and unlocked greater potential for discovering Earth-like planets in our galaxy.
The project centers on a software system engineered by PhD student Dr. Louis Desdoigts, a University of Sydney researcher, who spent two years building a tool capable of correcting blurry images produced by the JWST, a $10 billion space observatory. Fellow student Max Charles then deployed the solution to generate high-resolution images of far-off cosmic targets, including volcanic craters on Jupiter’s moon Io and intense jets of matter near a black hole.
Desdoigts described the achievement as a demonstration that a robust software solution can extend the telescope’s scientific reach without requiring hardware changes or leaving the lab. “This work brings JWST’s vision into even sharper focus,” he said. “It’s incredibly rewarding to see a software solution extend the telescope’s scientific reach – and to know it was possible without ever leaving the lab.”
The Australian-developed tool targets the Aperture Masking Interferometer (AMI), an instrument created by Professor Peter Tuthill, a physics imaging expert at the University of Sydney. AMI slots into JWST’s cameras and is designed to boost resolution by mitigating disturbances that can skew ultra-precise light measurements. Yet even this precision technology faced high-resolution challenges, revealing a latent flaw at very fine scales.
Professor Tuthill recalled a humbling moment when the instrument did not perform as advertised. “James Webb has just been this outstanding triumph. It’s just knocked everything out of the park. Except one thing,” he said. The issue stemmed from the brighter-fatter effect, where excessive light spreads to neighboring pixels, blurring faint signals from distant objects.
Associate Professor Benjamin Pope of Macquarie University, who supervised Desdoigts and Charles, proposed a digital twin approach: create a computer model that mimics AMI’s behavior and then invert the model to remove blur. Desdoigts spent years writing what Pope described as world-leading code, blending physics with machine learning to build and test the model against real JWST data.
Max Charles then evaluated the model on data from three cosmic targets. He studied a spiral pattern of gas and dust around a binary star system in Cygnus, roughly 6,000 light-years away, and a jet of matter orbiting a black hole at the center of a distant galaxy. The trio also captured Io’s volcanic craters with notable clarity, signaling a major improvement in JWST’s imaging capability.
“We know very well what Io looks like because we have spacecraft that orbit Jupiter,” Charles said. “But the fact that we could image it so well from James Webb, which is much further away, shows a lot of promise.”
Unlocking JWST’s full potential and beyond
Fixing AMI’s distortions doesn’t just improve a single image; it unlocks JWST’s power to detect extremely faint objects near bright sources, including exoplanets in tight orbits. The enhanced image quality expands the telescope’s ability to identify and characterize distant worlds, potentially accelerating the discovery of new planetary systems.
Desdoigts has since moved on to a postdoctoral role at Leiden University in the Netherlands, a leading hub for astronomy. Charles joined him briefly during a European working trip, and the duo marked their achievement with a lighthearted tradition—matching tattoos of the AMI instrument.
The work wasn’t merely a win for two students; it represented a broader methodology. Professor Tuthill suggested the approach could apply to other instruments on various telescopes, offering a pathway to improved discoveries across astronomy. “This is way more widely valuable than simply this one, ‘save your supervisor’s reputation’ moment,” he said. “Almost any instrument on any telescope could benefit from the approaches we’ve had to take here.”
As academic and scientific institutions continue to explore the balance between hardware advancements and software-driven corrections, Sydney’s team demonstrates how creative software solutions can extend the life and reach of premier instruments—potentially guiding future explorations of Earth-like worlds in our galaxy.
