What is astrophotonics?
Astrophotonics lies at the intersection of astronomy and photonics. It applies photonic techniques and devices — technologies originally developed for telecommunications and information technology — to manipulate and process light collected by telescopes, improving our ability to probe and understand the universe.
Photonics is the science of using materials to generate, transmit, manipulate and detect light. The telecommunications revolution of recent decades was driven by advances in fibre optics and integrated photonic circuits that enabled higher bandwidths over longer distances.
Astrophotonics harnesses these same technologies for astronomical instrumentation. By guiding starlight through optical fibres and photonic chips, astronomers can filter, combine, disperse and sense light with unprecedented precision and stability — often in instruments far more compact and robust than their traditional bulk-optics equivalents. Applications include OH-suppression fibre Bragg gratings that filter atmospheric emission lines, photonic lanterns that efficiently convert multimode telescope light into single-mode fibres, integrated beam combiners for interferometry, and photonic wavefront sensors for adaptive optics.
The University of Sydney, through SAIL and the Institute of Photonics and Optical Science (IPOS), is one of the world’s pioneering centres in astrophotonics. The field is now formally recognised by the international photonics community and continues to expand into new domains including space instrumentation, defence, telecommunications, remote sensing and environmental monitoring.