Throughout the history of the computer chip, engineers have treated waste heat as an inevitable cost of a calculation. Hannah Earley, however, thinks it’s a design choice. Earley, 31, is cofounder and chief technology officer of Vaire Computing, a startup building chips that recycle energy usually thrown away as heat—a strategy known as reversible computing. Ultimately, she thinks, this approach could help make data centers (and our laptops and phones) much more energy efficient. 

When conventional computer chips perform calculations, they erase the information they no longer need along the way, dissipating energy as heat in the process. Earley compares the approach to racing through a city only to pump the brakes at every intersection: The car loses momentum and must burn more fuel to accelerate again. Reversible computing aims to keep the momentum going—instead of erasing information from the intermediate steps in a calculation, the circuit retains it, making it possible to run the computation backward and recover some of the energy.

While the idea was first proposed more than 50 years ago, it proved impractical to implement with existing transistors and circuits. Earley, though, has completely rethought the hardware needed to make energy recovery work. She designed a patent-pending type of resonator—a microscopic chip component that stores recovered energy for later reuse. “It’s really a glorified pendulum,” she says. Last year, Vaire announced a key breakthrough: a chip with a resonator that recovered more energy than it lost, even after the energy needed to power the component was taken into account. For a subfield that has existed mostly in theory, the result was proof of life.

“It’s clear they have something interesting,” says Igor Markov, a researcher in electronic design automation and a former professor at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Still, he says, the technology is quite early stage; the company will need “a series of increasingly realistic and convincing demonstrations to attract the industry support needed for commercialization.” 

She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever.

Earley’s journey into chip design started sooner than most. She began programming around the age of nine, starting with high-level coding for the web before digging into other programming languages like Perl and Java. She continued progressing to more and more abstract layers of computing, until she got all the way down to transistors.

She eventually enrolled in a PhD program at the University of Cambridge under the computational biologist Gos Micklem. She started out studying how materials such as DNA could be used to perform calculations, but a few months in, Micklem sent her the 1999 PhD thesis of Michael Frank, a pioneer in reversible computing. Earley read it once, felt skeptical, read it again, and sat with it for a few weeks. She gradually became convinced that the connection between information, energy, and heat could change computers forever.

The fascination completely redirected her PhD work. Earley studied the physical limits of computation and built software that could turn ordinary programs into reversible ones. “Eventually I wouldn’t let her put my name on any of her papers, because I felt that I couldn’t really stand up and give a proper talk about them,” Micklem recalls. “It was her stuff.”

After completing her degree in 2021, Earley met Rodolfo Rosini, a technology entrepreneur and investor. The pair cofounded Vaire that same year, and the company has since raised more than $12 million, hired Frank as a senior scientist, and begun turning the vision of reversible computing into real hardware.

Innovation, however, doesn’t happen overnight. During the winter of 2022 in Grinnell, Iowa, Earley spent weeks in her now-wife’s basement apartment as the wind chill outside reached roughly −40 °F, covering a whiteboard over and over again with schematics for the core piece of circuitry needed to make reversible logic work. By the time the design finally came together, after the couple had escaped the cold for Las Vegas, it felt less like an aha moment and more like a gradual wave of relief. “I’m not completely out of my depth,” she remembers feeling. 

Earley and her colleagues’ next challenge is making their drastically different chip fit into familiar devices and manufacturing systems. She believes that’s where the future lies—not in further refining existing chips but in rebuilding them from the ground up with an eye toward reversibility. “I want to tackle every part of how computers are built,” Earley says, “and rethink it in these terms.” 

When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, as early as the end of next month, it will attempt one of astronomy’s most precise disappearing acts to date. The telescope will carry the first space-bound “active” coronagraph, an instrument that effectively erases most of the light from a star during photography.

It will allow astronomers to take the first pictures of planets orbiting other stars that are similar to those in our solar system. Ultimately, it could pave the way for a future mission that could snap the first photos of Earth-like worlds.

“I hope it’s remembered for it being that critical stepping stone for … finding Earth 2.0,” says Brandon Creager, the instrument’s lead mechanical engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).

Named after Nancy Grace Roman, NASA’s first chief of astronomy, this new telescope will carry a roughly 300-megapixel wide-field camera that will enable it to capture images about 100 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope’s widest exposures at a similar resolution.

These capabilities will help astronomers unpack the mysterious identities of dark matter and dark energy—and to detect around 100,000 new exoplanets, planets outside our solar system, whose presence can be inferred from the way they distort the starlight of more distant stars. Javier Viaña, a research scientist at Harvard who has had two projects selected for Roman’s highly competitive first year of observing, compares the leap to moving from “interviewing a handful of people” to “conducting a global census.”

Another camera will use the coronagraph, blocking out a star’s light as it observes one stellar system at a time. The instrument will allow astronomers an unprecedented look at the space around stars, enabling them to see smaller, dimmer, and more close-in exoplanets. “It’s giving us the ability to see planets that we haven’t been able to physically see before,” says Creager.

The anatomy of a vanishing trick

Coronagraphs in space aren’t new. But earlier incarnations, such as those currently aboard Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, use a stationary system to block a star’s blinding light. The approach does help, but it’s a bit like putting your thumb over a flashlight while searching a dark room for a firefly. Though the bulb vanishes, stray glare can still escape and overwhelm the light of the insect. Inside a telescope, that glare can come from light leaking around the edges of machinery or from minuscule imperfections in mirrors and coatings that can scatter starlight into speckles. All this can hide, or even impersonate, a planet.

Roman’s coronagraph, however, will attempt something completely unseen in space telescopes until this year: Before each observation, it will measure that leftover light and try to suppress it, a technique known as active wavefront control.

The telescope is able to do this because it contains two deformable mirrors. Each has a 48-by-48 checkerboard of actuators (tiny pistons) beneath a thin, deformable sheet of glass. Applying a small amount of voltage makes the actuators contract and tug their patches of mirror slightly backward, like thousands of microscopic fingers delicately sculpting a surface.

The effect is very subtle: Each patch of mirror can deform by up to 0.5 micrometers, or about one-fourth the size of an E. coli bacterium, and in increments as small as approximately 10 picometers. That’s about a tenth the diameter of a hydrogen atom, says Ilya Poberezhskiy, the instrument’s project systems engineer at JPL.

The actuators allow the mirrors to create an “active wavefront,” where each component is moved to the perfect position to cancel out incoming waves of unwanted light—a bit like a pair of noise-canceling headphones, but for light instead of sound. The “canceled-out” light creates a “doughnut-shaped region around the star where we suppress starlight and where we’re hoping to see exoplanets,” says Poberezhskiy.

Compared with current space-based coronagraphs, the system is expected to improve sensitivity to exoplanets against the glare of their host stars by a factor of up to 1,000, revealing planets that would have been far too faint to detect before.

Like Hubble and JWST, Roman also uses masks, patterned plates placed in the path of the light that are designed to block the photons that run into them. One tool in Roman’s mask arsenal is “silicon grass,” a thicket of microscopic spikes on some masks that can be used in certain configurations to absorb photons so they don’t bounce around the telescope and accidentally reach a detector.

Light entering the forest bounces deeper and deeper between the blades and gets trapped instead of reflecting back toward the camera. “Once the light gets into there, it never gets out,” Poberezhskiy says. The mirrors and masks form a succession of gates and hedges to guide as much of the preserved planetary light as possible toward the final detector.

Alien Jupiters

This elaborate setup could open a new chapter in the direct imaging of exoplanets. Nearly all exoplanets photographed so far are oversize youngsters that are nothing like the residents of our solar system: several times the mass of Jupiter, still glowing with the heat left over from their birth, and orbiting tens or hundreds of times farther from their star than the Earth is from the sun. This is because they are relatively easy to see. Their size, warmth, and distance from their parent star makes them shine brightly in infrared light, far away from the worst of the stellar glare.

Roman, however, could directly image a true Jupiter analogue—a planet similar to Jupiter in mass and circling a sunlike star a few times farther out than Earth is from our sun. Unlike the hot Jupiters we can see now, this one would be a much more mature gas giant like ours, primarily reflecting its parent star’s light after billions of years of cooling instead of heavily emitting its own.

Astronomers have been able to infer the existence of such planets from the gravitational wobble they impart to the star. Roman instead will collect starlight reflected from the planet itself. “We’re not looking at the star. We’re not looking at the effect of the planet on the star,” says Meredith MacGregor, a professor of astronomy at Johns Hopkins who has also secured an observing program. “We are actually looking at the planet, and that is super powerful.”

Once this instrument becomes available, it will become the scientists’ turn to do their jobs. “I’m honestly a little terrified about how we’re all going to deal with it, because I think it’s just so much data,” MacGregor says. “I think people will legitimately still be working on Roman data for decades.”

But don’t expect to see a 4K photo of an alien Jupiter in the coming months. Roman will not be able to resolve such a planet into a solid globe—at best, it will likely resemble a smattering of pixels. Still, that will be enough, MacGregor says, as Roman can then use the coronagraph to get information on the various wavelengths of light from the planet, which can tell astronomers about its atmospheric chemistry.

“You’re taking something that’s a point of light and turning it into an actual world,” she says, “because if you know that about its atmosphere, now you know something about the surface of the planet and the possibility of life being on that planet, right? So that’s a big step.”

During its first observations, scientists and engineers will see whether they can hold a star at the very center of the coronagraph’s masks, shape the mirrors, “dig” the dark doughnut (as Poberezhskiy describes it), and then maintain everything as the spacecraft moves through space and actively changes temperature.

The results will inform NASA’s proposed Habitable Worlds Observatory, the daydream of many an exoplanet astronomer, which will in theory be able to separate the light of an Earthlike planet from that of a sunlike star, over 10 billion times brighter.

Creager, who has worked on the instrument since 2018, is proud of the achievement: “Not too many people get to say, ‘I built something and it’s taking a picture of a planet that’s at a star that’s 50 light-years away or 100 light-years away.’” He imagines the moment he and his team will be able to look at the first image as it arrives: “Yes, we did that.” While the planet may show up only as a tiny dot, Roman’s achievement will be the darkness engineered around it.