The heart of the system is remarkably familiar hardware. Kosmiko is built around a Raspberry Pi 5 single-board computer that simultaneously controls two Sony IMX477 camera modules, the same class of sensor found in the popular Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera. The researchers operate these complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, or CMOS, active-pixel sensors in raw acquisition mode with the lenses capped, meaning the cameras work in complete darkness. In that darkness, the only signals that should appear are electronic noise and, crucially, the faint electrical fingerprints left behind when an ionizing particle passes through the silicon. Each crossing particle generates a shower of electron-hole pairs along its track, and the sensor readout electronics record this deposited charge as an unusually bright or saturated pixel, or as an elongated cluster of pixels tracing the particle’s path.

What separates Kosmiko from a simple curiosity is the rigor of its calibration strategy. CMOS sensors are imperfect devices: individual pixels differ in their dark response, some run persistently hot, others are noisy, and a few fire spuriously regardless of conditions. Rather than treating these defects as a nuisance, the Montpellier team places each pixel on its own footing. Every measurement run begins with a calibration step in which the intrinsic threshold of each pixel is derived from its statistical behavior in darkness. During the subsequent continuous image acquisition, the intensity of each pixel is compared online against its own personalized threshold. Only pixels whose intensities exceed their individual thresholds are stored; everything else is discarded immediately. This per-pixel discrimination drastically reduces the data volume, which is what makes long-duration acquisitions practical on modest, low-power hardware.

The methodology also confronts the problem of bad actors among the pixels. Hot pixels, noisy pixels, and recurrent pixels that repeatedly exceed their thresholds for mundane reasons are identified and filtered out, so that genuine particle candidates are not drowned in a sea of sensor pathology. The authors complement this with a suite of camera-health indicators based on dark-level statistics, noise distributions, and percentiles, allowing an operator to verify at any time that the sensor is behaving as expected and that any change in event rates reflects the radiation environment rather than a drifting instrument. This kind of self-monitoring is essential for any detector intended to run unattended for days or weeks.

Once the raw frames have been reduced to candidate events, the offline analysis layer of Kosmiko extracts physically meaningful observables. These include the frame-of-interest rate, which counts how many images contain at least one candidate, and the cluster rate, which counts localized groups of bright pixels. The software also characterizes the intensity distributions of events, indicators of track-like topology that suggest a particle crossed the sensor rather than merely triggering a single defective pixel, and the occurrence of saturated pixels, whose maximum-registering response is typical of heavily ionizing particles depositing large amounts of energy. Together these observables allow researchers to compare ionizing-event rates under different conditions without pretending to know more than the data can support.

Indeed, the team is explicit about the scope of the instrument. Kosmiko is not designed to identify individual particle species. A muon streaking down from the upper atmosphere, a gamma ray from a radioactive decay, and an alpha particle from radon progeny all leave charge in silicon, and disentangling them requires more than intensity histograms alone. Instead, the goal is a documented and deployable methodology for comparing ionizing-event rates under different conditions in the natural radiation environment. That comparative capability is scientifically valuable in its own right, because variations in event rate with altitude, shielding, underground depth, or proximity to weak radioactive sources all carry information about the composition and behavior of ambient radiation.

The experimental evidence presented in the paper spans an impressive range of radiation conditions. The authors performed tests with multi-alpha emitters and with a cobalt-60 gamma source using the PRESERVE platform, a facility funded by the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission, the Occitanie region, and the European Union through European Regional Development Funds. They conducted ground-level measurements of the natural background, and, in collaboration with the Laboratoire Souterrain à Bas Bruit in Rustrel, France, a National Underground, Low-Noise Laboratory operated with CNRS, they acquired data deep underground, where the cosmic-ray flux is heavily suppressed by hundreds of meters of rock. Comparing event rates across these radically different environments demonstrates exactly the kind of condition-to-condition sensitivity the instrument was built to provide.

The Kosmiko project sits within a growing movement to democratize particle physics. Previous efforts have shown that smartphone cameras can detect muons, and distributed networks of amateur detectors have been proposed as a complement to large observatories. Studies using CMOS sensors in cell phones for gamma detection and classification, along with dedicated cosmic-ray camera experiments using Raspberry Pi hardware, have established the basic feasibility of the idea. Kosmiko advances this tradition by combining it with the radiation-hardening and reliability expertise of the Montpellier group, whose prior work has focused on how atmospheric neutrons and natural radiation cause single-event upsets in advanced microelectronic memories. The same physics that threatens avionics and satellites, in other words, becomes a measurable signal in a hobby-grade camera.

Reproducibility is the watchword throughout the publication. The complete hardware configuration, the software workflow, and the resulting data products are described in detail so that other laboratories, classrooms, and citizen scientists can rebuild the platform and compare results meaningfully. The analysis pipeline is built on widely used open scientific tools, and the authors discuss practical observations about the camera components and the local measurement environment that would otherwise have to be rediscovered by trial and error. The team notes that no specific funding was received for the work, underscoring how inexpensive the platform is; the write-up credits Frédéric Wrobel with designing the experimental concept and methodology, with colleagues at the Institut d’Électronique et des Systèmes and the underground laboratory contributing to the alpha, cobalt-60, ground-level, and underground campaigns.

The implications reach beyond fundamental physics. A network of calibrated, low-cost pixel detectors could monitor natural radiation environments across wide geographic areas, support education by letting students see particle tracks with their own equipment, and provide empirical grounding for models of the terrestrial cosmic-ray flux such as those used to estimate radiation doses and predict electronic failure rates. Because the entire chain, from consumer sensor to per-pixel calibration to event-rate observables, is documented and deployable, Kosmiko lowers the barrier to participation in radiation measurement to the price of a small computer and two camera modules. In an era when frontier physics often demands billion-euro machines, there is something quietly revolutionary about silicon meant for photography quietly recording the passage of particles born light-years away, one calibrated pixel at a time.

Subject of Research: Low-cost CMOS image sensors used as pixel-calibrated detectors of natural ionizing radiation

Article Title: Kosmiko: from CMOS imaging sensors to pixel-calibrated particle instruments

Article References: Wrobel, F., Wrobel, J., Maraine, T., Boch, J., Risso, C., Dilillo, L., & Saigné, F. (2026). Kosmiko: from CMOS imaging sensors to pixel-calibrated particle instruments. Experimental Astronomy, 62(2), Article 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-026-10081-9

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10686-026-10081-9

Keywords: cosmic rays, CMOS sensor, active-pixel sensor, Raspberry Pi, ionizing radiation, Sony IMX477, particle detection, calibration, radiation environment, Experimental Astronomy, citizen science, underground laboratory

The scientific motivation behind SXPD rests on a well-established but poorly tested prediction. When high-energy electrons are accelerated in the tangled magnetic fields and hot plasma of a solar flare, they emit X-ray radiation through the bremsstrahlung process, in which electrons decelerate as they interact with ions in the solar atmosphere. Theoretical models predict that this radiation should be polarized, meaning that the oscillating electric fields of the emitted X-rays will be preferentially aligned in particular directions. The degree and direction of that polarization encode information about the geometry of the acceleration region and the pitch-angle distribution of the accelerated electrons themselves. In other words, polarization measurements can reveal not just how many electrons are accelerated and to what energies, but in which directions they are moving — a dimension of the physics that conventional spectrometry and imaging simply cannot provide.

Despite this promise, observational attempts to measure solar X-ray polarization have historically produced inconclusive and often contradictory results. Instruments aboard the OSO-7 satellite in the 1970s, the SMM mission, and the RHESSI observatory all attempted polarimetric measurements, and the CORONAS-F satellite observed hard X-ray polarization during major flares in 2003, but systematic uncertainties, limited sensitivity, and the notoriously dynamic nature of flares have left the field without a definitive picture. Earlier missions such as Tindo-era experiments and the more recent SolpeX spectrometer-polarimeter concept have pushed the technology forward, but a dedicated, high-sensitivity soft X-ray polarimeter optimized for solar flares has remained an unmet need. SXPD is designed to fill precisely that gap.

At the heart of the new instrument lies the GMPD, a gas detector technology that has been developed and characterized by the same research group in a series of prior publications. Gas pixel detectors measure X-ray polarization by imaging the track of the photoelectron that is ejected when an incoming X-ray photon is absorbed in the detector gas. The direction of that photoelectron track is correlated with the polarization direction of the incident photon, so by reconstructing many individual tracks statistically, the instrument can determine the polarization of the X-ray source. The GMPD approach uses a microchannel plate to amplify the ionization charge produced by the photoelectron, with a pixelated readout at the anode recording a high-resolution image of each track. This photoelectric polarimetry technique has matured rapidly in recent years, notably through its deployment on the IXPE X-ray observatory, and the Guangxi group has demonstrated strong spectral and polarimetric performance and position resolution with its own GMPD hardware.

The SXPD instrument is built from two key modules. The first is a Pinhole Imaging Tube, which forms images of the Sun using the simplest possible optical configuration: light, or in this case soft X-rays, passes through a small aperture and projects an image onto the detector plane. Pinhole imaging is exceptionally well suited to solar observations because the Sun is an extremely bright, extended target, and because the technique avoids the demanding optics and pointing requirements of grazing-incidence mirrors. According to the design study, the imaging capability of SXPD allows it to resolve individual solar flares in the soft X-ray energy range with an angular resolution of 1.5 arcseconds, fine enough to separate distinct flaring regions on the solar disk and to isolate the emission from a single flare. The second module is the GMPD unit itself, which performs the actual polarimetric and spectroscopic measurements on the photons collected by the imaging tube.

The combination is powerful. Because the imaging system can localize flares precisely, the polarimeter’s field of view is not diluted by unwanted emission from other active regions on the Sun, and background from the quiescent solar disk can be minimized. Meanwhile, the GMPD records both the energy and the photoelectron track of each absorbed photon, yielding simultaneous spectroscopy and polarimetry in a single measurement chain. The detector’s performance in this regime builds on extensive simulation and calibration work by the team, including photoelectron track reconstruction studies and data analysis methods based on Stokes parameters, the standard formalism for quantifying polarization in X-ray astronomy.

The design paper quantifies the expected sensitivity of the instrument in terms of the minimum detectable polarization, or MDP, a standard figure of merit that expresses the smallest polarization degree an instrument can reliably distinguish from zero at a given confidence level over a typical observation. Based on conservative estimates, SXPD can achieve an MDP of 15.0 to 23.0 percent for B-class flares, which are among the weakest events routinely observed by the GOES X-ray classification system. For C-class flares, the expected MDP improves to 8.0 to 12.0 percent. For M-class flares, an order of magnitude more energetic, the instrument should reach an MDP of 2.0 to 2.3 percent, and for the most powerful X-class flares, the sensitivity tightens to between 0.6 and 1.0 percent. These figures mean that even modest flares, which occur frequently during every solar cycle, become viable polarimetric targets, while the strongest events can be measured with a precision that would finally allow model discrimination rather than upper-limit statements.

The range of flare classes covered is itself scientifically significant. Solar flare activity follows an approximately eleven-year cycle, and the distribution of flare sizes is heavily skewed toward small events, with B- and C-class flares vastly outnumbering the rare X-class giants. An instrument capable of measuring polarization across this full dynamic range can accumulate statistically meaningful samples of flare polarization throughout the solar cycle, testing theoretical predictions about how the geometry of magnetic reconnection and particle acceleration changes with flare energy. Models of flare electrodynamics make specific, differing predictions about the polarization signature expected when electron beams are accelerated downward toward the solar chromosphere at the footpoints of magnetic loops, versus when acceleration occurs high in the corona at loop tops, and sufficiently precise measurements can distinguish between these scenarios. The SXPD design team points to decades of theoretical work on the intensity and polarization of X-rays at loop tops and footpoints, and to modern observational studies linking flare loop geometry to thermal and non-thermal emission timing, as the framework that such measurements would finally confront with data.

The practical engineering of SXPD also reflects lessons learned from the team’s broader polarimetry program, which includes contributions to the POLAR-2 low-energy polarization detector planned for the Chinese Space Station and related development of low-noise charge-sensitive pixel sensors and novel region-of-interest readout circuit designs. The simulation infrastructure developed for those efforts, including the SXPD simulation application, is openly available on GitHub, and the data processing pipeline applies track reconstruction methods optimized for photoelectric polarimeters. Monte Carlo simulation frameworks provided through collaboration with CERN have supported the characterization work, which was conducted at the Guangxi Key Laboratory for Relativistic Astrophysics with funding from China’s National Key R&D Program and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

If SXPD or an instrument like it reaches orbit during the coming solar maximum, the payoff could be substantial. Polarization measurements of soft X-rays from flares would directly probe the directionality of the electron beams that drive flare heating, testing whether the electrons responsible for 5 to 20 keV emission are beamed along magnetic field lines or distributed more isotropically, a question first raised by pioneering measurements in the 1980s that hinted at relatively isotropic electron distributions. Because flare-accelerated particles drive space weather effects that can disrupt satellites, communications, and power grids on Earth, understanding the acceleration mechanism is not only a matter of fundamental plasma physics but of practical forecasting. With its combination of arcsecond-class imaging, simultaneous spectroscopy, and percent-level polarimetric sensitivity across the full GOES flare classification range, SXPD represents one of the most concrete steps yet toward turning solar X-ray polarimetry from a tantalizing possibility into a routine observational tool.

Subject of Research: Design of a soft X-ray solar flare polarimeter based on gas pixel detector technology for measuring solar flare polarization and spectra

Article Title: Solar X-ray Polarization Detector (SXPD): a solar flare detector based on GMPD

Article References: Liu, H., Liu, H., Yi, D., Xiong, T., Feng, H., Feng, J., Feng, Z., Xie, F., Hu, H., & Liang, E. (2026). Solar X-ray Polarization Detector (SXPD): a solar flare detector based on GMPD. Experimental Astronomy, 62(2), Article 19. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-026-10079-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10686-026-10079-3

Keywords: solar flares, X-ray polarization, SXPD, GMPD, gas pixel detector, pinhole imaging, solar physics, bremsstrahlung, photoelectric polarimetry, space weather, particle acceleration, Experimental Astronomy

The method’s intellectual lineage stretches back to a 1982 paper by N. Bojarski, who formalized the inverse black body radiation problem: given measurements of emitted power across a range of frequencies, recover the underlying temperature distribution of the emitting body. Where the forward problem of radiative transfer is straightforward, the inverse problem is notoriously ill-posed, meaning that tiny errors in the input data can produce large errors in the recovered solution. Decades of work by applied mathematicians and physicists have produced regularization schemes, maximum-entropy formulations, and polynomial expansion techniques to tame this instability. The new study, led by Amal Pushp, Somita Dhal, Koustav Konar, and R. K. Paul of the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, with Konar affiliated additionally with Stellenbosch University and the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute in Groningen, brings this machinery to bear on one of the most precisely measured spectra in all of science.

That spectrum comes from FIRAS, the Far Infrared Absolute Spectrophotometer aboard NASA’s Cosmic Background Explorer, which in the early 1990s demonstrated that the CMB matches a perfect blackbody curve to extraordinary precision. The instrument’s full dataset, analyzed most famously by Fixsen and colleagues in 1996, remains the gold standard for absolute CMB thermometry. What distinguishes the new analysis is that it treats the FIRAS measurements not as a curve to be fitted, but as the input to an inversion that directly reconstructs a probability distribution of temperatures. In this framework, each frequency channel of the spectrometer provides a constraint, and combining triplets of frequencies yields a recovered profile over temperature whose peak and width encode the mean temperature and its uncertainty.

Running this procedure across the dataset, the team found that the recovered temperature distribution largely resembles a Gaussian, which is precisely what one would expect if the fluctuations in the monopole temperature are dominated by well-behaved statistical and instrumental variations. The story becomes more interesting in the wings of the distribution, however. A careful computation of the fourth standardized moment revealed a small but measurable excess kurtosis of minus 0.03, indicating tails that are slightly thinner than those of a perfect Gaussian distribution. In practical terms, this platykurtic character suggests that extreme temperature excursions are marginally rarer than a purely Gaussian model would predict, a subtle deviation that conventional moment-matching analyses of the FIRAS spectrum have not typically highlighted.

The frequency dependence of this signature adds another layer of intrigue. When the researchers divided the FIRAS band into subsets of low, mid, and high frequencies and repeated the inversion within each block, the signs of non-Gaussianity did not appear uniformly. Instead, the strength of the deviation varied with the portion of the spectrum examined, suggesting that whatever produces the departure from Gaussianity is frequency-dependent. This behavior is consistent with the known astrophysics of the microwave sky, where foreground emissions from galactic dust, synchrotron radiation, and free-free emission each carry distinct spectral shapes, and where any genuine primordial spectral distortions would also imprint frequency-specific structure. Disentangling these contributions is one of the central challenges of modern CMB science, and the inversion approach offers a new diagnostic window onto them.

The question of non-Gaussianity in the CMB is far from academic. In the standard picture of cosmological structure formation, primordial density fluctuations generated during inflation should be very nearly Gaussian, with any higher-order correlations constrained by the physics of the early universe. Theoretical work by Maldacena, Acquaviva and colleagues, and Komatsu and Spergel established tight expectations for the bispectrum, the lowest-order non-Gaussian statistic, while secondary effects such as the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect in galaxy clusters, weak gravitational lensing, and the integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect are known to generate measurable non-Gaussian signatures of their own. Detecting or constraining departures from Gaussianity therefore probes both fundamental physics and the late-time evolution of large-scale structure, which is why independent statistical methods for assessing the shape of CMB temperature distributions command attention.

The authors position blackbody radiation inversion as a tool for precision thermometry more broadly, and the present result serves as a validation of the method’s reliability. Previous work by overlapping teams has already applied the technique to the CMB monopole and dipole, placed an upper bound on the photon mass, estimated mu- and y-type spectral distortions in the FIRAS data, and examined the CMB through the lens of non-extensive statistics. Each application retraces the same logic: invert the observed radiance to recover the underlying temperature or occupation distribution, then interrogate the statistics of that recovered distribution. The consistency of the 2.729 kelvin result with the accepted value demonstrates that the inversion, despite its ill-posed character, can be stabilized sufficiently to compete with established fitting techniques on real archival data.

For the wider cosmology community, the appeal of such an independent method lies in systematic error control. Absolute measurements of the CMB temperature feed directly into estimates of cosmological parameters, recombination history reconstructions, and tests of the standard model of cosmology, and any method that extracts the temperature through a different mathematical pathway provides a valuable cross-check against instrument calibration assumptions and fitting-model choices. The reported uncertainty of 0.0195 kelvin is larger than the sub-millikelvin precision claimed for state-of-the-art FIRAS fits, reflecting the additional ill-posedness introduced by inversion, but the technique’s independence is its principal virtue. As future missions pursue ever-tighter limits on spectral distortions, methods like BRI could complement traditional spectral fitting and help distinguish genuine cosmological signals from instrumental and foreground contamination.

The study also underscores how archival data from completed missions continue to yield new science decades after their collection. By recasting the FIRAS spectrum through the mathematical framework of inverse problems, the researchers have extracted not just a number but a distribution, complete with second-order moments and kurtosis, offering a richer statistical portrait of the relic radiation than a single best-fit temperature can provide. Whether the slight frequency-dependent non-Gaussianity they detect ultimately traces to foregrounds, instrument systematics, or something more fundamental will require further scrutiny, potentially against foreground-cleaned CMB maps and upcoming spectrometers with improved sensitivity. For now, the work stands as a demonstration that the oldest light in the universe still has statistical secrets to yield, and that sometimes the most revealing way to read nature’s spectrum is to solve the problem backwards.

Subject of Research: Measurement of mean temperature fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background using blackbody radiation inversion of COBE/FIRAS data

Article Title: Investigation on mean temperature fluctuation of the cosmic microwave background using blackbody radiation inversion

Article References: Pushp, A., Dhal, S., Konar, K., & Paul, R. K. (2026). Investigation on mean temperature fluctuation of the cosmic microwave background using blackbody radiation inversion. Experimental Astronomy, 62(2), Article 18. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10686-026-10078-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10686-026-10078-4

Keywords: cosmic microwave background, COBE/FIRAS, blackbody radiation inversion, CMB temperature, non-Gaussianity, kurtosis, precision thermometry, cosmology, spectral distortions, early universe, inverse problems, Experimental Astronomy