A revolutionary new sensor in the University of Hawaii’s 88-inch telescope on Mauna Kea has greatly enhanced observations in infrared wavelengths, astronomers say.

This latest sensor is the culmination of a 20-year, $15 million effort that has developed five generations of increasingly larger and more powerful infrared sensors, says the UH Institute for Astronomy.

The institute released the first image from the new sensor on Thursday — a shot of the Whirlpool Galaxy, 23 million light-years away.

"The detail captured all across this extended infrared image really whets our appetite for getting these sensors into cameras at newer, much larger telescopes," said Donald Hall, the Hilo-based principal investigator for the project. "The level of detail revealed by digitally zooming in anywhere in the 16-megapixel image is truly incredible."

The sensor, called the HAWAII 4RG-15, has 16 times the pixel count of an earlier sensor developed by the same UH team and installed on the Hubble Space Telescope during the astronauts’ last refurbishment mission in 2009.

It also has four times the pixel count of the largest infrared sensors now in use at telescopes around the world, the institute said in a news release.

While 16 megapixels is comparable to today’s professional digital cameras, infrared sensors used for astronomy have another set of challenges, UH astronomers say: The pixels must be sensitive to infrared colors, and must be big enough to match the huge magnification of the image from a large telescope.

UH astronomers, with support from the National Science Foundation, joined with California-based Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, GL Scientific of Honolulu and ON Semiconductor of Phoenix to tackle those problems.

The silicon used to fabricate visible imagers is blind to infrared light, so infrared-sensitive crystals had to be electrically connected to each of the 16 million pixels.

To match the image scale at the focus of a large telescope, the pixels had to be huge — several hundred times that of the pixels in an iPhone, resulting in one of the largest silicon chips ever produced.

The infrared-optical sensor development program is run out of the institute’s facility in Hilo.

"These detectors are vital to the long-term success of the James Webb Space Telescope and other upcoming space astronomy missions," Hall said. "They also greatly improve the infrared sensitivity of ground-based telescopes such as those on Mauna Kea today and are critical for the coming generation of 30m-class telescopes, including the Thirty Meter Telescope planned for Mauna Kea."